[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview again features Dr. David Baker, Professor of Neuroimmunology at Queen Mary University of London in the U.K. We spoke at the ECTRIMS conference last fall. In part one of our interview he raised the issue of why there has been very poor translation from animal models to clinical trials. Today, Dr. Baker,...

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. David Baker, Professor of Neuroimmunology at Queen Mary University of London in the UK. We spoke at the ECTRIMS conference last fall, where I asked him about his work with cannabinoid compounds – work that has led to a better understanding of the cannabinoid system as well as to candidate drug...

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Drs. Bibiana Bielekova, who is an investigator at the National Institutes of Health, and Mika Komori, a postdoctoral fellow in her lab. We caught up with the two physician-researchers at the ACTRIMS meeting in New Orleans earlier this year. At the meeting, Dr. Komori talked about a new and more...

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Michael Levy, associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University. When we met in his office, he told me about his work on the role of T cells in neuromyelitis optica, or NMO. Finding antibodies to aquaporin-4 is indicative of NMO. But when Dr. Levy used aquaporin-4 reactive T cells,...

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-four of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Oscar Fernandez, a senior investigator at the Málaga Regional University Hospital in Málaga, Spain. When we met at a neurology conference in Chile, he reviewed for me some of the elements of risk stratification for second-line therapies for MS. That implies there are first-line therapies and...

[intro music]   Host — Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Lilyana Amezcua, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Part of her work focuses on defining racial disparities in MS, particularly among the Hispanic community. When we met, she said the prevalence of MS among Hispanics in Latin America...

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features a conversation with Dr. Shiv Saidha, an associate professor of neurology in the Division of Neuroimmunology and Neuro-infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. His work has focused on the retina in MS, using the technique of optical coherence tomography, or OCT, to...

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-one of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Jorge Nogales-Gaete, who is Chief of the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Chile in Santiago. We spoke at a neurology conference in Santiago about MS patients' perceptions of their clinical care and the importance of the healthcare team's...

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Welcome to the weird world of the U.S. pharmaceutical market. A few outrageous cases of drug price gouging have made the headlines, but in multiple sclerosis, a more serious concern is the steady annual rise in cost of all disease-modifying therapies, or DMTs. So says Dr. Daniel Hartung, a researcher at the Oregon State...

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-nine of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Charity Evans, assistant professor of pharmacy at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. After a drug is on the market, systematically evaluating hospital admissions and the reasons for them can add new evidence for its effectiveness or adverse effects. By using clinical data from...

Full transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. You may have heard of transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment for migraine, neuropathic pain, and treatment-resistant depression using an electromagnet positioned on the scalp. Dr. John Hart, a professor of neurology and neurotherapeutics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas,...

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Animal data, laboratory studies, and even some human evidence suggest that restricting caloric intake may have a salutary effect on diseases that involve inflammation, possibly including MS. I spoke with Dr. Ellen Mowry of Johns Hopkins University at last fall's ECTRIMS meeting in Barcelona about the rationale for testing caloric...

Full transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-Six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. A hallmark of multiple sclerosis is a new brain lesion. The active inflammation normally goes away in about 4 to 6 weeks, disappearing from contrast-enhanced detection by MRI scans. More recently, in some people with MS, researchers have found smaller longer-lasting inflammatory lesions outside the brain, in the...

Full Transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Many MS patients will require a change of drug therapy over the course of their disease, possibly because of relapse or tolerability. At last fall's ECTRIMS conference in Barcelona, I spoke with Eva Havrdová MD PhD, professor of neurology and head of the MS Center at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic,...

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-four of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. People with MS take disease modifying therapies, or DMTs, for years. But is it possible to stop the drugs at some point or at least take a drug holiday? I spoke last fall at the ECTRIMS meeting in Barcelona with Dr. Ilya Kister, an assistant professor in the MS Care Center at the New York University School of Medicine. He has...

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. For years, MS researchers have been looking for a measure of MS progression and disability that would be meaningful to clinicians, clinical researchers, patients, and the regulatory agencies that approve new drugs, such as the Food and Drug Administration. To this end, people have looked to composite endpoints that are sensitive...

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eight-two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Depression affects as many as 50 percent of people with MS during their lifetimes. But according to Dr. Adam Kaplin, a psychiatrist in the Johns Hopkins MS Center in Baltimore, it is treatable to a large extent, and with good results. Dr. Kaplin studies the immune basis of depression and cognitive impairment, specifically in MS and...

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-one of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. The science of pharmacogenomics can help identify those genetic variants that are associated with a high or low risk for experiencing an adverse drug reaction or a beneficial therapeutic response. While at the ECTRIMS conference in Barcelona last fall, I spoke with Kaarina Kowalec, a postdoctoral fellow in the Pharmacoepidemiology...

Full transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Interferon beta is a well-known and long used treatment for relapsing-remitting MS, but it's not without potential problems for some patients. While at the ECTRIMS conference in Barcelona last fall, I spoke with Kaarina Kowalec, a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of Neurology at the University of British Columbia...

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy-nine of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Wouldn't it be great to be able to predict who will develop MS? Then those people could be followed prospectively, possibly medication could eventually avert the disease, and at least some medical planning could be done early. Immunologist Dr. Nancy Monson, an associate professor in the department of neurology and...

Full Transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy-eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. A lot can be learned about pregnancy and MS by tracking pregnant women and their offspring over time. Dr. Dessa Sadovnick, a professor of medical genetics and neurology at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has started such a registry with international colleagues. I spoke with her at the World...

Full transcript: [intro music] Host — Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy-seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Pregnancy and the postpartum period present special concerns to women with MS. Dr. Annette Langer-Gould, a neurologist and epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles, investigates ways to lessen the risk of relapses in these women. We discussed the effects of breastfeeding, among other topics, when we...