Remyelination in Multiple Sclerosis is halted because the immune system attacks myelin. This remyelination in MS stops working as the body produces a type of an inflammatory response that ultimately causes demyelination. However, research done by Dr. Rodriguez and his team using experiments done on laboratory mice, this inflammation that demyelinates axons can also induce a process of repair called remyelination. This is what explains an apparent paradox of the laboratory mice improving in health when this inflammation was induced. Remyelination was fairly limited and patchy in the mice that were tested, but it did actually occur. The question that needed to be answered was if this process also occurs in humans, and if it does, could that process be harnessed for treatment of MS?

It is due to these findings that Dr. Lucchinetti, along with an international group of collaborating scientists in the MS Lesion Project, studied over 700 …