What are the scientific highlights of this
conference? So what are the highlights this year?
Well so my area of the
highlights has been to focus on the
scientific developments that are related
to the neurobiology of the disease
so how do we understand not necessarily
the immunology that my colleague
David Laplaud is covering...
So what is that?
Immunology is the immune system that
probably initiates the disease but
probably starts out outside of the
brain outside of the central nervous
system, how that gets initiated and
how that crosses over and attacks the
brain. And then in the case of the
neurobiology it's what's that damage
that's initiated what does it do
downstream. So it really is how does the
disease turn from an inflammatory
autoimmune disease into a degenerative
and progressive disease. And so the other
part of that is once myelin is damaged
how does a disease that's an
inflammatory disease of myelin become a
progressive disease of axons.
Okay, so I think a lot of the focus in this
congress has been on secondary progressive MS.
Yeah so that's I think because
of our fortunate successes in trying to
develop treatments for relapsing
remitting disease which is really
largely characterized by that early
inflammatory feature, the next stage or
the next step is how do we either
reverse progressive disease or at the
very least prevent it from ever
developing.
you
