Fred Lublin, MD: Current Challenges in MS

“Neurology for a long time didn't have much in the way of therapies, just good diagnosis, and now starting with MS, but other areas as well, we have multiple agents that alter the course of the disease; it's really exciting and it's been a little over 25 years now.”

Fred Lublin, MD, the Director of the Corinne Goldsmith Dickinson Center for Multiple Sclerosis at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, sat with NeurologyLive at the Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS) 2019 Forum in Dallas, Texas, to discuss some of the major challenges clinicians in MS face.

Lublin explained that the current state of care is interesting since MS is the leading edge of neurotherapeutics with multiple agents available that alter the course of the disease, but there are still many unmet needs. While ocrelizumab (Ocrevus, Genentech) is approved for primary progressive MS and a second agent is pending approval for secondary progressive MS, Lublin mentioned how these therapies have modest effects and there’s a need for better agents for progressive MS.

Aside from developing better therapies for progressive disease, additional issues Lublin discussed was the ability to individually prognosticate patients, repairing the damage to the nervous system, and then further down the line hopefully finding a cure to the disease.