23/11/2011

A team from the Research Group of Clinical Neuroimmunology at Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) and CEM-Cat, directed by Dr. Xavier Montalban, has led an investigation that described a predictive marker of response to treatment with a drug of first choice, Interferon-beta (IFNB), in patients suffering from Multiple Sclerosis (MS). This new marker will help determine if patients treated with IFNB respond to this treatment or not.This finding, which was recently published in the journal Annals of Neurology, allows to know very early whether a patient will respond well to treatment or not and allows it with security and certainty, as the early results are correlated with the lack of response after two years of treatment. In the case of MS and treatment with IFNB this is especially important, both by the characteristics of the disease itself -chronic degenerative, disabling and incurable-, and the fact that the IFNB, one of the treatments of choice in MS, carries potential side effects and, at the same time, have therapeutic alternatives that are an option to consider in these cases. Therefore, it is possible to prevent that patients begin treatment with a drug that could not be completely effective, as the disease can move forward without the possibility of returning to the starting point.