Paving the way towards an effective treatment for multiple sclerosis: advances in cell therapy

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a leading cause of chronic neurological disability in young to middle-aged adults, affecting ~2.5 million people worldwide. Currently, most therapeutics for MS are systemic immunosuppressive or immunomodulatory drugs, but these drugs are unable to halt or reverse the disease and have the potential to cause serious adverse events. Hence, there is an urgent need for the development of next-generation treatments that, alone or in combination, stop the undesired autoimmune response and contribute to the restoration of homeostasis. This review analyzes current MS treatments as well as different cell-based therapies that have been proposed to restore homeostasis in MS patients (tolerogenic dendritic cells, regulatory T cells, mesenchymal stem cells, and vaccination with T cells). Data collected from preclinical studies performed in the experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) model of MS in animals, in vitro cultures of cells from MS patients and the initial results of phase I/II clinical trials are analyzed to better understand which parameters are relevant for obtaining an efficient cell-based therapy for MS.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Cellular & Molecular Immunology

• Publication date

  2021-05-06

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/s41423-020-00618-zPMID 33958746PMCID 8167140
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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