{"id":2635,"date":"2017-03-29T14:00:30","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T18:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neuroscience.uchc.edu\/?p=2635"},"modified":"2023-07-25T12:27:17","modified_gmt":"2023-07-25T16:27:17","slug":"sick-stem-cells-point-to-better-ms-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/2017\/03\/29\/sick-stem-cells-point-to-better-ms-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"Sick Stem Cells Point to Better MS Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Doctors seeking a cure for an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis keep chasing a mirage: no matter how well a drug works in the lab, it never seems to\u00a0help\u00a0many patients in the clinic. But after closely examining stem cells from patients and their families, researchers think they know why the drugs coming out of labs are duds. Neuroscientist Dr.\u00a0Stephen Crocker, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at UConn Health,\u00a0and colleagues offer an explanation in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0014488616303843\">Feb. 1\u00a0issue of <em>Experimental Neurology<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>People with multiple sclerosis (MS) suffer from vision loss, pain, and paralysis that grows worse over time. The symptoms are from stray electrical signals in the nervous system. Our nerves operate like electrical wires, and just like wires, they need insulation around them. The insulation around our nerves is a substance called myelin, made by other\u00a0cells in the brain called oligodendrocytes. For reasons that are not yet understood,\u00a0the oligodendrocytes in people with multiple sclerosis don\u2019t reliably repair the myelin. So people with MS gradually lose myelin, and their nerves start to short out like frayed wires, and eventually these neurons die.<\/p>\n<p>Most kinds of MS have a pattern of illness and then remission: symptoms flare up, then go away, then flare up again. There are effective drugs that help patients extend the periods of remission, and someone diagnosed with MS in his or her 20s may live comfortably for decades. But primary progressive MS (PPMS) is different.\u00a0Patients diagnosed with PPMS&#8230; (<a href=\"http:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2017\/03\/sick-stem-cells-point-to-better-ms-drugs\/\">more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Doctors seeking a cure for an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis keep chasing a mirage: no matter how well a drug works in the lab, it never seems to\u00a0help\u00a0many patients in the clinic. But after closely examining stem cells from patients and their families, researchers think they know why the drugs coming out of labs [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":2638,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 00:45:56","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2635"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6009,"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635\/revisions\/6009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/health.uconn.edu\/neuroscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}