News commentary
One particular session on Day 2 of the four-day 7th Joint ECTRIMS-ACTRIMS Meeting — which drew 10,000 researchers, doctors, industry representatives, and patient advocates to hear about advances in multiple sclerosis (MS) treatment and understanding — attracted so much interest that all seats were taken in the huge lecture hall and late-comers had to claim spots along the walls.
This event was the Burning Debate session, called “Rumble in the jungle: B cells vs. T cells” — an allusion to the historical boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in 1974.
At ECTRIMS, the duel pitted two world authorities on MS, with distinct views on the importance of T-cells and B-cells in the disease, against one another. But like almost everything in MS, reality intruded; the complexity of this disease made a clear-cut face-off impossible.
Rather, the fierce debate suggested by the title turned out to be more of an affirmative pat on the back as each researcher made his respective arguments, with only a slight disagreement on the relative importance of the two cell types evident between the two men.
Stephen Hauser with the University of California, San Francisco, a neuroimmunologist who has contributed vastly to the understanding of MS disease mechanisms, argued that B-cells are, indeed, most important in MS. But he showcased data supporting T-cell involvement as well.
And while David A. Hafler — an immunologist at Yale School of Medicine who has provided equally important contributions to the understanding of how the disease develops — did not disregard B-cells, he argued that T-cells cannot be ignored.
Hauser, who spent decades on the development of a B-cell therapy, including Ocrevus (ocrelizumab), opened the discussion by simply showing data from the two Phase 3 trials exploring that now-approved treatment in relapsing MS patients.
“This is my argument,” he said, with the backdrop of a graph showing how Ocrevus reduced inflammatory lesions by 95% to 97% compared to interferon-beta 1a in the studies exploring the drug in those MS patients.