International Physician Update

Hopkins’ New MS Center Gives Trials Thumbs-Up

Peter Calabresi is conducting groundbreaking MS clinical trials.

 The new Johns Hopkins Multiple Sclerosis Center has opened with an offering of clinical trials unlike any so far in the institution’s history.

“With nine neurologists and staff, we can tailor current therapies to patients,” says
Peter Calabresi, who heads the center. “But,now, we’ve begun conducting large international trials that follow from laboratory discoveries.” Soon, he says, “we’ll start smaller translational ones even closer to the edge.”

Hopkins’ approach to MS to date has clearly advanced what’s known of the disease. “Real” MS has been winnowed out from look-alikes, for example. Scientists have described the immune basis of the disease and eliminated trendy but wrong ideas of its cause, saving wasted years of research.

But now a host of high-tech approaches is enhancing the earlier finds, pinpointing targets worthy of trials. Calabresi, new to Hopkins, has worked a decade to show, for example, how white blood cells—memory T cells—imprinted for autoimmune attack slip from blood vessels into the nervous system. He’s hunted characteristic proteins on the surface of those cells drawn “in full battle gear” from MS patients. His study has revealed a protein key to T cell migration
and promoted a therapeutic antibody against it.

Calabresi’s face brightens: “The data in a Phase II trial of 220 patients were stunning!  After once-a-month IV of the antibody, patients had a 90 percent reduction in active lesions and essentially no side effects!”