A major new project is to test the benefits of an immune-dampening molecule in helping to treat motor neurone disease, it has been announced.
Researchers are to study interleukin-2, which is being studied as a low-dose treatment for a range of immune-system related conditions.
At high doses it is already an established treatment for cancer.
Motor neurone disease is incurable and long-term survivors, like Professor Stephen Hawking, are rare.
The project has a budget of nearly six million Euros from the European Commission and researchers hope its in-depth research will open the way for more discoveries about the disease.
Project leader Dr Gilbert Bensimon, of University Hospital, Nimes, France, said: “Our main objective is to achieve a breakthrough in the treatment of MND by significantly slowing the progress of the disease through a low dose of IL-2.”
Fellow project leader Professor Nigel Leigh, of the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK, added: “We are delighted to be collaborating with world-leading research groups in biomarker development, immunology, genetics and gene expression on this project.
“This collaboration will allow us to research a number of factors that may affect MND. Taken together, these analyses should allow us to ‘individualise’ responses to treatment that may be revealed during the study.”
One of the researchers Professor Pamela Shaw, of the Sheffield Institute of Translational Neurology, said the project was “very exciting.”
She said: “Not only will we be able to investigate whether interleukin-2 slows the disease course in MND by modifying the inflammatory response within the nervous system, but we will also be investigating in the SITraN laboratories, in a work-package led by Dr Janine Kirby, biomarkers which will tell us at an early stage whether the treatment is beneficial and whether all patients or a particular subgroup develop a positive response.”
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