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How near are we to a cure for multiple sclerosis?
That will be the question on the minds of those attending Saturday's Carolinas Consortium on Multiple Sclerosis, which is being held in Charlotte.
Dr. Simon Gregory, of the Center for Human Genetics at Duke University Medical Center, will be among those offering answers.
"It's like a snowball," he said last week. "We've started rolling at the top of the hill and we seem to be finding things rather quickly."
In 2007, Gregory was part of the team that identified the first gene associated with an increased risk of developing multiple sclerosis. That advance was hailed as the first major genetic discovery about MS in more than 30 years.
Gregory and his collaborators proved a link between the interleukin 7 receptor gene and susceptibility to MS. Since then, more genes have been identified as having an association with MS.
About 400,000 Americans have the chronic, unpredictable disease of the central nervous system. Symptoms include blurred vision, loss of balance and coordination, numbness, extreme fatigue and memory problems.
The task for researchers now is to identify why these genes play such an important role in the immune system and how they are involved in MS.
Gregory and his team have a $1.3 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health and the National MS Society.
"If we can identify the molecules that are regulating this gene, they become candidates to test to see if they are also causing MS," Gregory said. "This is very basic research. We have a number of unknowns we have to address."
Some money came from Charlotte movie theater developer Herman Stone, whose $1 million gift was disclosedin April at the N.C. Research Campus in Kannapolis.
The campus, founded by David Murdock, the billionaire owner of Dole Food, is on the site of the former Pillowtex mill complex.
Although Gregory is based at Duke, he'll also be working at the Kannapolis campus, which has the latest genetic technology in its Core Lab.
Murdock has also given Duke scientists $35 million for a long-term study of Cabarrus County-area residents. Gregory hopes MS will be one of the diseases examined by that study.
Blood samples are being collected from area residents and will be used by researchers to examine diseases at the molecular level. They'll look for "biomarkers" that could predict why people respond differently to treatments and how to make treatments more effective for individual patients.
Finding biomarkers could lead to diagnostic tests, Gregory said. "Imagine something like a pregnancy test or blood-sugar level test, where you could take a drop of blood...and monitor yourself, to assess the stage of your disease.
"That's going to take many years," he said. "...You don't know what you're expecting until you find it. And you don't know how it can be applied until you've researched it."
