mRNA Vaccines & Their Potential in MS

Recently published research from the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University has looked at the use of an mRNA vaccine as a potential treatment for multiple sclerosis. In this below video, our co-founder, Brett Drummond, discusses this study, which showed positive results in an animal model of MS. The abstract can be read here.

Video Transcript (Verbatim):

Hi everyone, I’m Brett Drummond. I’m an MS researcher, science communicator and co-founder of MStranslate and I’m here today to talk to you about another multiple sclerosis research project update. So without further ado, let’s get into it.

Okay, so welcome!  So as I said, we’re today talking about another multiple sclerosis research update and this is on a new publication that’s come out, the link to the abstract can be found in the description of the video, but essentially it’s talking around the concept of an mRNA vaccine for multiple sclerosis. Obviously, mRNA vaccines are particularly interesting at the moment, as this is new technology that’s been used as part of the COVID-19 vaccine strategy, but in this instance, it’s using a slightly different way of going about it.  I’m just going to provide a little bit of background information to it and then talk about the results that they’ve obtained and then some of the potential questions that still need to be answered in this space.

So when we talk about an mRNA vaccine, just to explain what mRNA is and how this works.  So, mRNA is this area here in the middle.  So this is the intermediate step, if you will, the middle step going between DNA, which is our genetic material – the things that make us who we are – and proteins, which are the functional parts of the body – the things that do all of the things that we need to do.  So mRNA is basically a way of taking that genetic code and converting it into proteins.  And so in terms of the strategy behind this, they use the MRNA vaccine to take mRNA that codes for myelin proteins, so proteins that may be attacked as part of the autoimmune response that we see in multiple sclerosis.

So, just looking at this sort of image here, just talking about what’s going on – on the right here is what we see as part of the autoimmune response to multiple sclerosis, where although this is labeled as non-self, in an autoimmune disease, that’s actually self proteins.  So what’s happening is that the immune cells are recognising parts of the body – and in multiple sclerosis we think that that’s proteins of the myelin sheath – as being foreign. So they think it’s something that they should attack and so they go and attack and that’s what causes the symptoms and clinical aspects of multiple sclerosis that we observe. And what they hope to do using this strategy is essentially take what we see on the right and convert it to what we see on the left. Really, it’s about making the immune system tolerant to these proteins and that’s the concept of immune tolerance is something that we talk about.

So they use this strategy to provide mRNA that then gets made into these myelin proteins, which then hopefully shifts that from being a negative immune response to being a positive immune response and making the body tolerant to it, so that it stops attacking the myelin. So they used this strategy in an animal model of multiple sclerosis, called EAE, and they saw a couple of things. Firstly, they saw that it resulted in delayed onset of the disease and also they saw that there was reduced disease severity.  So both positive things indicating that this could be a potential novel treatment approach and what they saw is the reasons behind this is that, as we talked about on that previous slide, they did manage to shift that immune profile.

So they did manage to create more cells, which are those tolerant cells, and they’re called regulatory T cells and we know that regulatory T cells are important in autoimmune diseases and that they tend to be in lower abundance in multiple sclerosis, but using this technique, in this animal model anyway, they managed to increase the number of those regulatory T cells and decrease the numbers of the reactive T cells or the ones that are going around and creating the damage.  So this is obviously really positive, really interesting and it’s an exciting new technology, as we’ve seen a lot over the past 12 months in this space, obviously, as I said, as it’s involved in the the COVID vaccine, but obviously we need to be careful about not jumping too far ahead and reading too much into this at the moment.

So as I said, this was an animal study – this study was just done in this mouse model of multiple sclerosis and so we know that there are differences obviously between mice and humans and we see that a lot of studies that show promise in animal models, don’t necessarily translate to the same sort of positive results when taken into human trials.  But what other sort of questions might we have in this? Well one of the big differences between the animal models that are being used here and how this approach might work in human trials is that in these animal models, they know the targets of the immune response and generally they’ve actually used those targets to create the disease.  So they know what myelin protein is important and what myelin protein the immune system is reacting against in the mice and so they could use that to create this mRNA vaccine. In humans, there have been a lot of proposed targets of the immune response, but we don’t know the exact targets yet and so this sort of approach might be slightly more difficult.

In saying that though, one of the things that they did observe in the animal model was that the tolerance that was created wasn’t necessarily just to the target of the mRNA vaccine and they did see a bit of what they called bystander tolerance, so it was able to create a tolerance to other things around in the area as well.

So that’s a summary of this, it’s obviously really interesting research. As always, if you do have any questions, please do post them below the video and I’ll make sure that I respond. If you’re watching this on YouTube, please do subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you’re watching it on another platform, please go across to our YouTube channel and subscribe there as well, because we will be doing more video content, unique to our YouTube platform this year, so that’s the best way to stay on top of everything that we’re doing.

Thanks everyone.

Hope you found this interesting.

*As mentioned, mRNA vaccines are being developed to protect against COVID-19.  Stay up-to-date with the COVID-19 vaccine guidances being published by major MS organisations by clicking here.