Apitope Announce Positive Peptide Therapy Results

Imagine you have a dog and a cat and they keep fighting.

Solution 1: give one of your pets to someone else.

Solution 2: Teach them to get along.

Solution 1 describes almost all current MS therapies…if the immune system and the nervous system can’t get along, let’s get rid of the immune system. Solution 2 describes the approach being taken by Apitope with their peptide based treatment. Essentially, it is meant to work by showing the immune system small sections (called peptides) of a protein that makes up the myelin sheath (called myelin basic protein) and making them tolerant to it.  Myelin basic protein has been chosen as it has long been considered a major target of the autoimmune attack.

They have just reported positive Phase 2a results, however, we are yet to see these published. The press release by Apitope comments that their study resulted in a significant reduction in the number of new lesions, as well as the total number of lesions and the lesion volume.  This was a small study that included 19 people with relapsing MS.  We will comment more once these results become available and provide a full summary.