Dr. Rhonda Voskuhl UCLA Department of Neurology

I guess my fascination with the immune system started when I was a kid with bad asthma. I was always on steroids or some type of shot, and I didn’t understand why other kids were well when I wasn’t. Why was my immune system so over reactive compared to other kids? Doctors were heroes who made me feel better (even with all the shots), and that heroism was part of what drew me to medical school. I also loved learning about the brain – which is really “who we are.” This made the study of the immune system attacking the brain a perfect area for my career.

Fast forward to today, 22 years into a career studying multiple sclerosis. One area I focus on is studying gender differences in MS. Women get MS three or four times as often as men, and when men do get MS it’s usually more progressive. Why? That’s the sexy part – sex differences I mean...
....To this end, we are pursuing whether differences in sex chromosomes or normally circulating levels of sex hormones impact disease susceptibility and disease progression.

Another area is related to pregnancy. In the third trimester of pregnancy, women with MS see up to a 70 percent reduction in relapse rates. So, my research teams and I are currently testing
pregnancy levels of the hormone estriol administered in a daily pill (hormone or placebo) to non-pregnant women with MS. In our two-year multi-center trial where all participants have relapsing-remitting MS and use Copaxone, the primary outcome measurement is frequency of relapses. In our new one-year trial, the primary outcome measurement is cognitive improvement; this trial includes women with relapsing remitting as well as secondary progressive MS who use any FDA-approved disease-modifying treatment.

We’re testing estriol primarily because it’s unique to pregnancy, it’s safe, and because it helped
improve lost cognitive function when administered to mice with experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE: the “mouse form” of MS). Mice with EAE have cognitive effects similar to those in MS – demonstrated by their behavior and in lost nerve endings (called synapses) – and in mice with the MS model of disease, estriol treatment improves that behavior and rebuilds those nerve endings. Amazing!

I hope you’re as excited as I am at how close this means we are to finding a treatment that is neuro-protective (serving to protect neurons/nerves from injury or degeneration) and could therefore have disease-halting capabilities, and maybe even some improvement effects. How novel that a naturally occurring, safe pregnancy hormone could prove to protect neurons from further damage, effectively stopping MS in its tracks! We’ll share results in 2014 and 2015.

Today, thousands of people are gathered at our nation’s capital for the Rally for Medical Research – to raise awareness of the critical need to make funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) a priority. You don’t have to be there in person to show your support! My research would not be possible without funding from the NIH and the National MS Society. While the pharmaceutical industry is extremely important to bring new therapies to market, it’s hard for them or other investors to support research into products such as naturally occurring hormones or generic solutions because they won’t be as profitable. Academics like me are out there doing novel research toward new treatments not only to slow MS, but to stop and reverse it, through the pathway of NIH, Society and other generous donor funding and partnership. You can support this pathway, not just through donations to the Society, but through activism. Ask your member of Congress to preserve funding for the NIH – it’s one email with a potentially HUGE response.