CMSC 2023

The Elliot Lewis Center attended the
Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers 2023

The 2023 Annual Meeting was held in Aurora, CO May 31-June 3. The Annual Meeting of the CMSC is the largest North American meeting for healthcare professionals and researchers engaged in MS care. The CMSC Annual Meeting brings these professionals together to learn from MS thought leaders about cutting edge research findings, clinical advances in the diagnosis and management of MS, and emerging
care issues.

At this year’s CMSC chronic “smoldering” inflammation was the focus of many presentations. Chronic inflammation causes symptom progression that occurs in the absence of relapses or new MRI lesions. We attended lectures about ways we might be able to treat it chronic inflammation and how to visualize it with specialized MRIs.

Many presentations were about BTK inhibitors (BTK stands for Bruton tyrosine kinase), new class of medications that may have an impact on both relapsing and progressive forms of MS. There are at least five different BTK inhibitor drugs in development and data suggests they can cross the blood brain barrier and effect chronic inflammation in ways that are current medications can’t. Everything we’ve seen suggests that there is good reason to be hopeful that these medications can have a significant impact on progressive forms of multiple sclerosis!

In addition to learning about the BTKi therapies, we learned about frexalimab, an anti-CD40L monoclonal antibody that is involved with cell signaling between B and T-cells, as well as other immune cells in the body. This medication blocks inflammatory signals without depleting the cells. This medication is very early on in development, but could potentially be useful for both relapsing and progressive forms of multiple sclerosis.

The Elliot Lewis Center and our research department, Dragonfly Research, presented 2 posters at the meeting. Posters presented were focused on our ACAPELLA data. ACAPELLA is our in-house research project, studying the real world experience with Ocrevus. We presented our year six data, as well as our data on hypogammaglobulinemia. These posters and prior research are listed on our website at https://elliotlewisms.com/our-research/