An American neurologist and an Italian epidemiologist whose work revolutionized the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS) on Saturday won a prestigious Breakthrough Prize, nicknamed the “Oscars of science.”
Stephen Hauser and Alberto Ascherio were recognized for their decades researching the debilitating neurodegenerative disease, which affects nearly 3 million people worldwide and was long considered an impenetrable enigma.
Hauser’s work on MS started more than 45 years ago, when he met Andrea, “an extraordinarily talented young woman who was already an attorney” and working at the White House under then-US president Jimmy Carter, he said.
Photo: 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,” he said.
Then 27 years old, he decided to make it his life’s work.
Photo: AFP
“At the time, we had no treatments for MS. In fact, there was also a pessimism that treatments could ever be developed,” said Hauser, now 74 and director of the neuroscience institute at the University of California, San Francisco.
Scientists knew the disease, which damages the central nervous system and leads to paralyzing cognitive and motor problems, was caused by the immune system turning on the body.
However, they thought the white blood cells known as T cells were the lone culprit.
Studying the role played in the disease by B cells, another type of white blood cell, Hauser and his colleagues recreated the damage MS causes to the human nervous system in 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, but Hauser and his team pressed on.
They persuaded pharmaceutical company Genentech to back testing.
In 2006, they found that treatments targeting B cells were associated with “a dramatic, more than 90-percent reduction in brain inflammation,” Hauser said.
That threw open a door to bring new treatments to market that slow the advance of the disease in many people.
However, it raised other questions. For example, what would cause white blood cells to turn against the body?
That puzzled Ascherio, now a professor at Harvard University.
He investigated why MS mostly affected people in the northern hemisphere.
“The geographical distribution of MS was quite striking,” he said. “MS is very uncommon in tropical countries and near the equator.”
He and his team carried out a long-term study following millions of young US military recruits.
After nearly 20 years of research, they came up with an answer. In 2022, they confirmed a link between MS and the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a common infection responsible for another well-known disease, infectious mononucleosis, or mono.
“Most people infected with EBV will never develop MS,” but everyone who develops MS has had EBV first, Ascherio, 72, said.
The discovery did not explain why MS occurs, but it fueled hope of finding new treatments and preventive measures for a disease that remains incurable.
Ascherio’s breakthrough could also help treat 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, but “there is some evidence,” he said.
“It’s like where we were on MS 20 or 30 years ago,” he added.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS