New Delhi: In a breakthrough which could help people suffering from multiple sclerosis, scientists have discovered that it is the interaction between two types of white blood cells which trigger the crippling disease.
"Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease of the brain and spinal cord affecting more than two million people in the world. It usually starts at young age between the age of 20-40 years old.
Although the disease is usually not life threatening, it leads to substantial disability. Often patients are wheel-chair ridden," said Gurumoorthy Krishnamoorthy, lead scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany.
"The research on multiple sclerosis has proven particularly difficult. This is due to the fact that it involves sensitive brain tissue and is, therefore, inaccessible", he told reporters in an email interview.
"Much of our current knowledge about MS has come mainly from studies in animal models. Until now, animal models of MS mainly focused on one type of immune cells called T cells.
However, in addition to the T cells, B cells, a type of immune cells, suspected to play a very crucial role in the destruction of brain cells was largely ignored by the existing animal models", the scientist who originally belongs to Tamil Nadu said.
The current study by the team found that it is the interaction between T and B cells which is a cause for the disease.
"We have created a new mouse model which develops MS like disease spontaneously. In this mouse, T cells attack its own brain tissue.
However, without the B cells they were not able to cause the disease. This observation strongly suggests that the interaction between T and B cells are crucial to cause MS like disease," said Krishnamoorthy.
"The central immune cells in MS are T cells that can misrecognise any brain protein to cause extensive damage. These type cells can be found in many healthy individuals. However, there is no easy way to predict who will develop MS and who will not," he said.
"We have observed that in another mouse models, T cells reacted with one brain protein called Myelin Oligodendrocyte Glycoprotein (MOG).
Surprisingly, the same T cells also reacted with another brain protein namely Neurofilament-M. We propose that these dual-reactive perhaps multiple-reactive T cells may cause severe damage and can be used to predict who will develop MS," he said.
Krishnamoorthy said these observations gave scientists new insights into the causes of multiple sclerosis and the new spontaneous animal model also can used to validate novel therapeutic compounds to treat MS.
Bureau Report