This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Community: Knowledge & Support

Actually one of the upsides of Cyclophosphamide is that it's got a long and well known history which I've seen termed "acceptable" but I'll leave it to those who are considering it's use to decide how they would define it.

I'm not sure what would have to be approved by the FDA. The drug itself is already approved and it's long been used for MS in lower doses. I don't think you need FDA approval to up the dose even though it involves a radically different treatment strategy in this case.

You're right but I guess the saving grace of the situation is that when the data is compiled and becomes public and is favorable it would quickly become known to neurologists and wouldn't need to be advertised.

Similarly, I think it's favorable that drug companies don't have a vested interest in Cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan) because the concept of "rebooting" is the interesting thing and not the drug itself. Cyclophosphamide itself is nothing more than the far from perfect first step which hopefully new agents will be invented/perfected along the way until we end up with what Tovaxin was represented to be.....eliminating only the abberant cells responsible for the MS process.

So really what is (hopefully) going on is that, because we don't know which part(s) of the immune system are responsible for MS, Cyclophosphamide is used to kill the whole immune system with the hopes that the new immune system is naive to MS and hopefully with time the evolution of what started as a "sledgehammer" approach will result in a treatment that is very specific and refined.

Of course all that is of little value to people who are convinced that immune system involvement is secondary.

OK, I continue to agree to disagree but I still have to wonder how you explain to yourself some of the amazing and long term improvements some people have experienced for a decade or more thanks to HDC, and that's not to hint that there haven't also been some failures along the way too.
Bob

Hi Harry,
Even though you'll be eliminating a lot of pertinent results by searching this way, go to pubmed and type in "high dose cyclophosphamide multiple sclerosis".

Usually I'm against trying to form an opinion from article abstracts only but in this case notice the number of articles, the favorable titles.

After that, search "prokarin" and then "ccsvi" and after that point try to maintain your conviction that those things are in the same league in regards to of quantity of research and quality of findings that HDS has behind it.

I honor the fact that we all have our own opinions because if everyone was always right I'd never experience the enjoyment of saying "I told you so".