In the UK people have a real issue with non-human primate research and there is essentially no MS related work ongoing in the UK. You know we love our furry friends and in the 1980s when I worked in a place where people worked on marmosets and Epstein Barr Virus, they used to have their car checked every day to ensure there were no bombs attached. The anti-vivs (vivisectionists) had a rather militant arm that were letter and car bombing researchers working with cats dogs and monkeys and digging up and stealing the dead mother-in law of the guinea pig sellers. They also sent letters to the neighbours of guinea pig users to say that that they were living next to a Paedo and no….it had nothing to do anyone formally known as Prince or Jeff.
Here we have a paper on the remyelination potential of clemastine in the France/USA, Here they say ” led to a first successful double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial evaluating a remyelinating therapy for multiple sclerosis (MS) [A. J. Green et al., Lancet 390, 2481-2489 (2017)]. However if it was so great in humans in a trial done a decade ago why is this not a reality for people with MS….where is their phase III trial? The Dutch are doing a phase III needed for approval. Clemastine fumarate as Remyelinating Treatment in Internuclear Ophthalmoparesis and multiple sclerosis (RESTORE) but one is concerned that without pharma doing these studies it is going nowhere fast. On wonders why you are doing primate work when there are so many human trials. They inject an oligodendrocyte toxin into the visual pathway. The primate studies allow you to control things but the study was n=2 and n=3 so I ask why bother doing this type of study as the study is surely too small so give you confidence. They add three different controls from other experiments and times so not compelling. There are outcomes but for a phase III and approval you need to see clinical benefit,
Sarrazin N, Arab R, Cordano C, Brazhnikova E, Chazot J, Arcizet F, Bachelin C, Langui D, Bennett DJ, Abdelhak A, Halait H, Moissonnier P, Nouvel-Jaillard C, Pouget P, Green AJ, Baron-Van Evercooren A.Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2026 Feb 24;123(8):e2520161123. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2520161123. Epub 2026 Feb 20.
Promotion of remyelination has become a new therapeutic avenue, to prevent neuronal degeneration and promote recovery in white matter diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Clemastine fumarate among several promyelinating agents, has been validated as a promyelinating agent in rodents and has led to a first successful double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial evaluating a remyelinating therapy for multiple sclerosis (MS) [A. J. Green et al., Lancet 390, 2481-2489 (2017)]. To date, most of promyelinating strategies have been developed in short-lived rodent models of demyelination, which spontaneously repair. Well-defined nonhuman primate models closer to man would allow to efficiently advance therapeutic approaches, and namely to assess noninvasively, their efficacy in promoting functional repair. We developed a nonhuman primate model of optic nerve demyelination which leads to failed remyelination, progressive neuronal degeneration, and visual dysfunction, thus recapitulating several features of MS lesions and providing the missing link to translate emerging preclinical therapies to the clinic for myelin disorders such as multiple sclerosis [N. Sarrazin et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 119, e2115973119 (2022)]. We used this model to assay the therapeutic benefits of clemastine. Our histological and ultrastructural findings show that clemastine is able to overcome the failed remyelination of the non-human primate optic nerve. We also used visual evoked potential, optical coherence tomography, and electroretinogram as noninvasive means to follow up the optic nerve de/remyelination process and correlated these findings with post-mortem analysis to establish the safety and efficacy of clemastine therapy in promoting functional and morphological recovery in nonhuman primates. We demonstrate that clemastine can overcome chronic demyelination in nonhuman primates.
Source: multiple-sclerosis-research.org