Neil Scolding, Burden Professor of Clinical Neurosciences Frenchay Hospital and the University of Bristol

 

 

The MS team at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol has two key aims – to deliver the best possible care to patients with multiple sclerosis, and to conduct multiple sclerosis research of the highest possible calibre, in particular exploring and developing stem cell therapies for patients with this difficult and complex disease.

We have established two new units in which these inter-related activities take place, both part of the specialist Neurosciences Centre at Frenchay. The BrAMS Centre (Bristol and Avon Multiple Sclerosis; www.brams.org.uk) – is where our more clinically-based activities take place. It was newly opened nearly three years ago, and houses our specialist MS Nurse team, our dedicated physiotherapist, the fundraising BrAMS charity team lead by Shaun McCarthy, the outstanding MSRTE group, and not forgetting the vital secretarial and admin. staff! Specialist consultant clinics are held there, a wide range of clinical trials take place, and we have an intravenous infusion suite for administering conventional and trial-based medicines.

Our laboratory work takes place in the MS Stem Cell labs in the Burden Neurological Institute. We concentrate on studying repair in multiple sclerosis, which involves understanding how damage takes place to begin with, and developing therapeutic strategies for preventing and reversing this damage. This in turn involves studying stem cells, and in particular we are exploring human bone marrow stem cells. These are present in all of us. Their normal function involves contributing to repair in various tissues around the body, and they are able to do this in many different ways – dampening down inflammation, protecting cells against toxic and damaging molecules, replacing some cell types, stimulating other populations of stem cells that are already present in tissues (including the brain and spinal cord), and reducing scar formation, to name just some of their activities. We concentrate on these  cells for a number of reasons, and the fact that they can engage in and stimulate repair in so many different ways is one of these reasons – it makes them especially suitable for a disease as complex as multiple sclerosis. Additionally, they are capable of getting into the nervous system after injection into the blood circulation, representing another advantage; they appear to be safe; they do not carry the same ethical problems as cells taken from human embryos; and finally, since they are taken from individual to be treated, they are not seen as ‘foreign’ and so not rejected.

We have carried out a significant body of laboratory research studying these cells. Building on this experimental basis, we recently completed the world’s first clinical trial of mixed bone marrow cells for repair in six patients with longstanding multiple sclerosis. We were sufficiently encouraged by the results of this study, which confirmed the safety of this approach, and provided some preliminary evidence of a possible beneficial effect, that we now hope to conduct a much larger trial commencing at the end of this year or early in 2011.

We have been fortunate enough to have been awarded a donation of over a million dollars from a USA-based benefactor trust, the Silverman Family Foundation, but we still need further funds (the total trial cost will be approximately £1.5m). We would really appreciate any further donations, large or small, from lottery winners or other interested readers would be extremely welcome!
Professor Neil Scolding

If you would like to make a donation to our work, please don’t hesitate to contact either myself [n.j.scolding@bristol.ac.uk], or Shaun McCarthy [shaun.mccarthy@brams.org.uk].