Multiple Sclerosis Discovery: The Podcast Of The Ms Discovery Forum

[intro music]   Hello, and welcome to Episode Twenty-Seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller.   This week’s podcast features an interview with Dr. Brenda Banwell about a new journal on multiple sclerosis and related disorders, of which she is a co-editor-in-chief. But to begin, here’s a brief summary of some of the latest developments on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org.   This week we published two stories related to articles published in the December 2014 issue of JAMA Neurology. The first article is about the interim results of the Halt MS trial. In this phase 2 clinical trial, physicians performed autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplants on 24 patients with relapsing-remitting MS. In other words, the team obliterated the patients’ existing immune systems and attempted to hit the reset button by infusing the patients’ own stem cells. Three years after the treatment, 78% of patients showed no signs of disease activity, significan