Washington (AFP) – An American neurologist and an Italian epidemiologist whose work revolutionized the treatment of multiple sclerosis on Saturday won a prestigious Breakthrough Prize, the award nicknamed the “Oscars of science.” Stephen Hauser and Alberto Ascherio were recognized for their decades researching the debilitating neurodegenerative disease, which affects nearly three million people worldwide and was long considered an impenetrable enigma.
Hauser’s work on multiple sclerosis (MS) started more than 45 years ago, when he met a young patient named Andrea, “an extraordinarily talented young woman who was already an attorney” and working at the White House under then-president Jimmy Carter, he told AFP. “Then MS appeared in an explosive fashion and destroyed her life,” he said. “I remember seeing her, unable to speak, paralyzed on the right side, unable to swallow, and soon, unable to breathe on her own, and I remember thinking that this was the most unfair thing I had ever seen in medicine.” Then 27 years old, he decided to make it his life’s work.
At the time, Hauser noted, there were no treatments for MS. In fact, there was also a pessimism that treatments could ever be developed. Now 74 and director of the neuroscience institute at the University of California San Francisco, he explained that scientists understood MS as a disease that damages the central nervous system and leads to paralyzing cognitive and motor problems, caused by the immune system turning on the body. However, they believed that the white blood cells known as T cells were the sole culprits.
Hauser questioned that assumption. Studying the role of B cells, another type of white blood cell, he and his colleagues managed to recreate the damage that MS causes to the human nervous system in small monkeys known as marmosets. The US federal body overseeing medical research dismissed the link as “biologically implausible” and turned down their application for funding for a clinical trial. Despite this setback, Hauser and his team pressed on. They persuaded pharmaceutical company Genentech to support their testing. In 2006, they obtained resounding results: treatments targeting B cells were associated with “a dramatic, more than 90-percent reduction in brain inflammation.” Hauser described it as “something of a scope that had never been seen before.” This breakthrough opened the door to bringing new treatments to market that slow the advance of the disease in many patients, but it also raised other questions, such as what causes our white blood cells to turn against us.
This query intrigued Ascherio, who is now a professor at Harvard. He began investigating why MS predominantly affects individuals in the northern hemisphere. “The geographical distribution of MS was quite striking,” he told AFP. “MS is very uncommon in tropical countries and near the equator.” This observation led him to wonder whether a virus could be involved. He and his team conducted a long-term study following millions of young US military recruits. After nearly 20 years of research, they confirmed in 2022 a link between MS and the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a common infection responsible for another well-known disease, infectious mononucleosis, or mono.
Ascherio noted, “Most people infected with EBV will never develop MS.” However, he stated, “everyone who develops MS has had EBV first.” While this discovery did not fully explain why MS occurs, it fueled hope for finding new treatments and preventive measures for a disease that remains incurable, and whose current treatments do not work on all patients. Additionally, Ascherio’s breakthrough could extend to treating other conditions. “We are now trying also to extend our investigation, to investigate the role of viral infection in other neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, he said. The link remains theoretical for now, but Ascherio believes “there is some evidence.” He added, “It’s like where we were on MS 20 or 30 years ago.”
© 2024 AFP
