DNA Vaccine Shows Promise for Halting MS

If you have not heard about the latest promising treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS), listen up! There is a DNA vaccine that is showing some promise in early clinical trials which seems to stop the harmful immune system responses which cause the myelin destruction and resulting lesions. This vaccine would also work similar for type 1 diabetes as well as a few other autoimmune diseases.

The very early studies of this vaccine show promise in a phase one trial. So far, the vaccine has proven to be safe in the short term but it will take a while longer before the long term ramifications are known. However, the preliminary reactions and evidence teasingly show great promise.

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease which works in a specific way – the T cells that supposedly are supposed to attack germs and such actually end up attacking your own nerve cells. The new vaccine currently in clinical phase trials works to latch onto only those cells that cause MS while leaving the good T cells alone.

The advantage to this new vaccine is that it has the potential to produce far fewer side effects than the current multiple sclerosis medications which just treat the symptoms rather than the cause. In fact, that is the sole goal of the vaccine – to target MS disease causing cells. When you have the disease, your T cells attack the protective sheath around your nerve fibers called myelin and in fact specifically targets certain proteins called antigen.

The test vaccine uses a DNA specially engineered which serves to encode these antigen proteins. While other vaccines may incite an immune response against the antigen proteins in the vaccine, this new one in the test phase works to latch itself to the antigen proteins in such a way as to shut off your body’s immunological response instead of turning against your body.

During this first phase, those MS patients who got the vaccine did not have any worsening of symptoms and in fact, MRI tests showed that there were not as many lesions in the brain than those with a placebo. Of course, larger trials would be needed with more MS patients to test to see if this trend in the reduction of lesions would still occur.

The great thing about DNA vaccines is that scientists can target very specific things within your immune system, like targeting those very specific T cells that attack the nerves in MS patients. If it truly works in larger trials, it would be a major success and a big leap in the right direction towards curing the disease as well as many other autoimmune diseases.

Until this DNA vaccine has been thoroughly tested, there are plenty of medications that are coming out on the market to target MS which will help lessen the severity of symptoms or even put your body in remission for stretches of time. It could, unfortunately, take years before the vaccine is available to the general public of MS patients.