If you can cast your mind back to ECTRIMS 2016 in London…We were sat outside the Excel Centre in London making our poster for the next days poster session we had some helium balloons saying 95 percent, which was the number of people that were losing hand function with MS and it was part of the Think hand campaign to get people to think about hand function. The MS world was and still is obsessed with leg function as outcomes for trials and they kept failing and some people thought it was too late to do anything. But we had come to the conclusion that MS is a length-dependent axonopaathy meaning that the longer nerve tracks take on more damage and so lose function more quickly. We had seen this in the beasties tail goes first then hindlegs and then rarely front legs. So could we save hand function when leg function had gone. So if we focused on hand function as an end.point then it may not be too late. ProfG went to pharma to sell the idea of O.hand. or Oratorio hand which was a trial to have hand function as the primary outcome and ProfK took the route of a trial for people in wheelchairs called CHARIOT-MS. When the data of OPERA and ORATORIO was analysed from a hand perspective it was clearly positive with slowing of progression by 45 percent. If the ASCEND trial had used hand function as a major outcome natalizumab would be available for progression and other drugs would have been available decades ago. It would not be too late to try and save function yet at ECTRIMS 2025 will see papers on stopping treatment based on data based on leg function. We will see PIRA data based on leg function…we are a decade on and London is a distant memory but in Barcelona we will see ProfG present the O-hand data.will it be curtains for ProfG as the trial goes down in flames or will some people need to take their head out of the ground…I say some people because the outcomes in MS are increasingly been seen as a composite that includes hand function…but if positive then it says it is not too late to try and save function…Not long to wait now, watch the pharma space as they will announce the result to their share holders first…Will this be Impact? An idea born in London to a Promise made in 2010…Not long to wait.
Source: multiple-sclerosis-research.org