Development of a drug discovery pipeline for Secondary Progressive MS

Project Summary:

MS often initially presents a relapsing-remitting clinical course (relapsing-remitting MS, RRMS) that is followed by a progressive phase (secondary progressive MS, SPMS) of continued and irreversible accumulation of disability.  This project will address the lack of therapeutic options for the SPMS phase.

The goal of this project is to establish a multidisciplinary team with expertise from Genzyme Corporation (USA), research groups at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (USA), the Montreal Neurological Institute (Canada), the University of Montreal (Canada) and The Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), to screen for drug candidates that modulate the activity of immune cells in the central nervous system (astrocytes, microglia and infiltrating macrophages), which have been found to promote disease progression in SPMS. These studies will identify drug candidates, through innovative tools and experimental, multidisciplinary models, to be analyzed in SPMS clinical trials.  As part of the studies, libraries of drugs already approved for human use in other diseases will be screened.