Myelin changes in RRMS patients
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Tracking myelin changes in vivo with 18F-florbetapir PET and MRI in patients with Multiple Sclerosis. A Proof of concept Pilot study
IRAS ID
162152
Contact name
Marios Politis
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurological condition, which affects around 100,000 people in the UK. In MS, the coating around nerve fibres (called myelin) is damaged, causing a range of symptoms. Myelin protects the nerve fibres in the central nervous system, which helps messages travel quickly and smoothly between the brain and the rest of the body. In MS, the immune system, which normally helps to fight off infections, mistakes myelin for a foreign body and attacks it. This damages the myelin and strips it off the nerve fibres, either partially or completely, leaving scars known as lesions or plaques. This damage disrupts messages travelling along nerve fibres – they can slow down, become distorted, or not get through at all.
The exact causes of MS are still unknown. There is a considerable activity throughout the pharmaceutical industry to develop remyelination therapies for the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis. A major challenge in clinical studies of such remyelination based therapies is to assess and quantify any changes in myelin content in vivo. Bringing together expertise in PET and MRI, we propose to implement and evaluate both mcDESPOT and 18F-florbetapir PET on the same cohort of patients, allowing the relationship between MRI and PET derived markers of myelin to be determined. The implementation of such robust, cross-validated, in vivo myelin measures would provide substantial benefits for MS research and clinical practice, including better monitoring individual patient’s responses to therapy and better understanding of the effects of various therapies on disease progression.REC name
London - South East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/LO/1268
Date of REC Opinion
16 Oct 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion