A fantastic story about a small trial where our friends with advanced multiple sclerosis were given huge doses of Chemotherapy drugs. These doses were high enough to kill off the immune system cells purportedly responsible for the damage of MS, but not enough to the point where the source cells for the immune system (yes, the Stem Cells!) were hurt. When the immune system regenerated, the MS was "gone"!
"Doctors report promising results using huge doses of a potent chemotherapy drug to treat autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis, though only a handful of patients have been treated so far and one MS researcher said far more study is needed before any victory is declared.
The drug, cyclophosphamide, is given at such high doses that it destroys most or all of a patient's disease-fighting immune cells.
However, the stem cells within the patient's bone marrow survive the drug's onslaught, the doctors say, and then are stimulated with other drugs to rebuild the immune system from scratch - but without the bad triggers that caused the body to attack its own cells."
Click "read more" to get the rest of this promising story.
Note: This is all wild speculation by the crew of This is MS, but here goes: In this story is an implication that "new" cells produced by the body of an MS patient do not inherently have the program to attack the body-- otherwise, the cells regenerating after the chemo would just pick right up and continue their attack. This suggests that the cells acquire their suicidal tendencies afterwards, by means of something that is destroyed through chemo... of course, we need MUCH more detail to actually support such a hypothesis, but it's good to think outside the box.
