A New Blood Test to Monitor Damage in MS

A New Blood Test to Monitor Damage in MS
 

Presented by Dr. Melissa Gresle, University of Melbourne - Florey Neuroscience Institutes.

Transcript - A New Blood Test to Monitor Damage in MS

A NEW BLOOD TEST TO MONITOR DAMAGE IN MS

Dr. Melissa Gresle
Hi my name is Melissa Gresle, and I work at the Multiple Sclerosis Laboratory at the Howard Florey Institute under the supervision of Trevor Kilpatrick and Helmut Butzkueven.

Our project is to investigate a new type of blood test for monitoring nerve fibre damage in MS patients.

So we’ve been working in collaboration with researchers at the University of Florida to develop a new blood test that can detect a protein that is released from damaged nerve cells into the blood and we use this blood test to measure levels of damage that are occurring in the brain and spinal cord.

To begin, the research, the work was performed in a mouse model of MS. And in this mouse model we were able to show that we could in fact detect these proteins in the blood of these mice. And we’re now working with support from MS Research Australia to move into human trials.

Over the last 18 months, we’ve been able to apply our blood to test in the clinic and what we actually found was in a proportion of patients with relapsing and remitting MS, the blood’s levels of protein were increased. And in these patients what we actually found was that they had more rapidly progressing disability. So what we’re actually trying to do is take these studies and extend them to show what we’ve developed is a blood test that can be used to predict disability in MS patients. This work is being carried out in collaboration, at the moment, with researchers at Boxhill Hospital Hopefully over three years we’ll have a diagnostic tool for MS.

The protein that we’re looking at is called neurofilament H and it’s actually part of the structure of the nerve cell so it helps to form the skeleton of a nerve cell. And when these cells are damaged, this protein spills into the blood and we can detect the protein in blood to tell us damage has actually occurred.

So what we now understand about MS is that it’s not just a disease that, where the immune system attacks the myelin coating, but rather during this immune attack nerve fibres themselves can also be damaged so there are sort of two aspects of the disease that are occurring at the same time. So it’s very important not to only target the myelin but also the underlying nerve fibres in order to minimise the damage that’s occurring.

Over the last 18 months we’ve been able to recruit 85 patients with relapsing/remitting MS in the study. And also about 136 healthy volunteers. So we’ve got a really nice sample base out at Boxhill for this study.

The blood test that we’ve developed works by using antibodies that were produced in mice. And these antibodies recognise the protein that we’re looking at in humans. And so we perform this simple blood test to measure, using these antibodies, how much of this protein is within the human samples.

This blood test will be useful for identifying patients that are likely to have a more progressive disease course from very early on in the disease so we can target them more aggressively with therapies. What we hope to use this blood test for is actually monitoring patients and how well they’re responding to therapies and whether they’re likely to develop disabilities over time.