sask. prof hopeful new ms treatment could stop disease progression

after extensive research into a certain cell protein, a team of university of saskatchewan researchers hope to develop a new kind of multiple sclerosis (ms) medication that prevents the disease from slowly progressing in people.michael levin, the saskatchewan multiple sclerosis clinical research chair and a professor in the u of s college of medicine, said there are two most common types of ms. the first is called relapsing remitting ms, where a person’s immune response enters the brain and spinal cord, attacking it. this creates flare-ups of symptoms followed by recovery periods.the second type is progressive ms, where the disease gradually progresses in patients over years as their quality of life declines.current ms medications are effective at combating the first type of the disease, said levin, but there’s no treatment that prevents the disease’s slow progress.“the medications we have for ms now are great at reducing relapses … but in between the relapses or even while they’re on a med and we’ve nipped the relapses in the bud, patients still get worse,” he said.that’s what he hopes to change with the help of a research team he leads at the u of s.building on his earlier published research that identified a missing or misplaced cell protein — nicknamed a1 — in the brains of ms patients was killing nerve cells, levin hopes to take that knowledge and turn it into a treatment to prevent the slow progression of the disease.while the average person has the a1 protein in their neurons, levin said, in ms patients, this protein is either in the wrong place or missing entirely. this discovery led to the conclusion that “a1 is critical for nerves to survive,” he said.ongoing, unpublished research levin is now working on shows guarding the a1 protein to keep it in place helps restore nerve cells.“we’re finding if we can keep a1 not only in the cell, but if we can keep it in the nucleus where it belongs, then we can actually see those nerve cells grow back,” he said.“we’re looking at medications that specifically protect the nerve cell and that’s really where our thinking is different and that’s where the excitement is because there’s no medications that do that yet.”as someone who also regularly works with ms patients at saskatoon city hospital’s ms clinic as a neurologist, levin feels an urgency in developing this treatment.“ms is so common in canada and saskatchewan has the highest rate of ms in canada, and in north america, so the urgency comes from the people we serve,” he said, although he noted it is impossible to yet give a timeline on how long it could take to develop and test a new medication.levin anticipates the treatment would become an add-on medication for patients who already have a prescription to treat their relapses.lgiesbrecht@postmedia.com