Stephen Hauser and Alberto Ascherio were recognized for their decades researching the debilitating neurodegenerative disease, which affects nearly three million people worldwide and was long considered an impenetrable enigma.
“Then MS appeared in an explosive fashion and destroyed her life,“ he said.
Then 27 years old, he decided to make it his life's work.
“At the time, we had no treatments for MS. In fact, there was also a pessimism that treatments could ever be developed,“ said Hauser, now 74 and director of the neuroscience institute at the University of California San Francisco.
But they thought the white blood cells known as T cells were the lone culprit.
Studying the role played in the disease by B cells, another type of white blood cell, he and his colleagues managed to recreate the damage MS causes to the human nervous system in small monkeys known as marmosets.
But Hauser and his team pressed on.
It was “something of a scope that had never been seen before.”
But it also raised other questions. For example, what would cause our white blood cells to turn against us?
That was a question that puzzled Ascherio, today a professor at Harvard.
“The geographical distribution of MS was quite striking,“ he told AFP.
That made him wonder whether a virus could be involved.
After nearly 20 years of research, they came up with an answer. In 2022, they confirmed a link between MS and the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a common infection responsible for another well-known disease, infectious mononucleosis, or mono.
But everyone who develops MS has had EBV first.
Ascherio's breakthrough could also help treat other conditions.
The link remains theoretical for now. But “there is some evidence,“ he said.
“It’s like where we were on MS 20 or 30 years ago.”
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