It was demanded that I post as many EAE and Mouse posts as possible from ECTRIMS2025… so happy to oblige. The first post from ECTRIMS2025 is about anti-CD40 ligand this blocks T cells interacting with B cells to deliver their activating signal. However a question I have posed to the students is what does anti-CD40ligand do and how does it work….Sadly non of the medical students have selected to do this essay for the past two years suggesting that they can’t be bothered or it is tooo difficult. You will hear the story of what anti-CD40 ligand does in MS at this very conference but there is an inference that it will affect antigen presenting cell function (i.e. dendritic cells and interference for an effect on progression and it could block T cells and with that in mind surprisie surprise an antibody to CD40Ligand blocks EAE. So this says to me the action has little to do with B cells as in my hands B cell depletion does rather little in EAE because it is T cell medicated. So here we have the inference that anti-CD40L inhibits progression and so off we go to target progressive MS…..Now I hope it works but the study in mieces is targeting the processes that are driving relapsing disease and it blocks inflammation so it should inhibit relapsing MS. The inference is that there is targeting of the driver of disease within the CNS. Lets hope this is true but we have to ask the question how much antibody is actually targeting the CNS because one imagines that this will be very low. However studies like these fuel the hype that anti-CD40L willi targeting progress MS, so if I were at the conference I would be asking how this is achieved and what evidence is there that this i how it is working.
Source: multiple-sclerosis-research.org