The therapeutic armamentarium for MS has changed dramatically in the last 20 years or so. The most advanced therapeutic approaches are monoclonal antibodies, which has the advantage to be very targeted to a given target. To be very effective on the one side and to reduce the side effects on the other.
We have different monoclonal antibodies useful for the treatment of MS. I will review two of them, which is two classes of them...
The therapeutic armamentarium for MS has changed dramatically in the last 20 years or so. The most advanced therapeutic approaches are monoclonal antibodies, which has the advantage to be very targeted to a given target. To be very effective on the one side and to reduce the side effects on the other.
We have different monoclonal antibodies useful for the treatment of MS. I will review two of them, which is two classes of them. One, which is natalizumab, which prevents the move of lymphocytes from the periphery to the CNS, by blocking alpha-integrin on the blood vessel’s membrane. This is a very well known treatment. The new things about natalizumab is the fact that there are studies now showing that you can space the administration, from four weeks to six weeks. And having the same effect or the subcutaneous administration, instead of the infusion administration. The drug has been shown to be very effective since many years.
The other class is anti-CD20 monoclonal antibodies. We have several of them, the two most important and most recent are ocrelizumab on the one side, which is given every six months through infusion. And the very recent one is ofatumumab, which is a fully human monoclonal antibody, which is given subcutaneously every month. So both of them are very important in terms of, in this cases, depleting the B-cells and their effect on the immune cascade leading to tissue damaging multiple sclerosis. The main news in this era is the incoming of ofatumumab, as I said, which is a new fully human monoclonal antibody.