Remyelination therapy goes to trial for multiple sclerosis
Citation Manager Formats
Make Comment
See Comments

With a number of new drugs approved, the last decade has seen tremendous progress in the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS). All current drugs work by decreasing inflammation through modulation of the immune system, and while they have been very efficient in reducing the rate of relapses, their impact on the chronic disease course is unknown. A current thought in the MS therapeutics community is that drugs that enhance remyelination may be more effective in reducing long-term disability. This hypothesis is based on the observation that disability in MS increases with age as the capacity of oligodendrocytes to remyelinate decreases.1 Additional support for this hypothesis comes from extensive preclinical studies showing that promoting remyelination either by transplanting myelinating stem cells2,3 or by pharmacologic enhancement of endogenous myelination processes reduces clinical severity in animal models of MS.4,5 In this issue of Neurology® Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation, Tran et al.6 take this possibility to its exciting next step by reporting the results of the phase I clinical trial of the first drug aimed at promoting myelin repair.
Footnotes
Go to Neurology.org/nn for full disclosures. Funding information and disclosures deemed relevant by the authors, if any, are provided at the end of the editorial. The Article Processing Charge for this editorial was waived at the discretion of the Editor.
- © 2014 American Academy of Neurology
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial No Derivative 3.0 License, which permits downloading and sharing the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be changed in any way or used commercially.
Letters: Rapid online correspondence
NOTE: All contributors' disclosures must be entered and current in our database before comments can be posted. Enter and update disclosures at http://submit.nn.neurology.org. Exception: replies to comments concerning an article you originally authored do not require updated disclosures.
- Stay timely. Submit only on articles published within the last 8 weeks.
- Do not be redundant. Read any comments already posted on the article prior to submission.
- 200 words maximum.
- 5 references maximum. Reference 1 must be the article on which you are commenting.
- 5 authors maximum. Exception: replies can include all original authors of the article.
- Submitted comments are subject to editing and editor review prior to posting.
You May Also be Interested in
Related Articles
- No related articles found.