MS News That Caught My Eye Last Week: Global MS Numbers, Pregnancy and MS, ANK-700

MS Prevalence at Over 2.8 Million Worldwide, Update to Atlas Reports

With almost 3 million of us around the world, we’re not really rare, but we’re rare enough that our MS is still a puzzle to many. People seem to know what muscular dystrophy is (probably because of the annual telethon in past years), and they know about cancer and heart disease. Why don’t they know about MS? We need to do more to promote MS awareness, wouldn’t you agree?

More than 2.8 million people worldwide are now estimated to be living with multiple sclerosis (MS), including about 1 million in the United States, an update to the Atlas of MS reports.

An increase since its previous update, this number translates to someone, somewhere in the world, being newly diagnosed with the disease every five minutes, the National MS Society announced in a press release on the update.

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Pregnancy Delays Likely MS Onset by About 3 Years, Large Study Finds

How MS affects pregnancy is a question I see asked regularly in social media groups. This study may help to partially answer that question. It reports that pregnancy may delay the onset of MS symptoms. Other studies have reported that a woman has fewer relapses while pregnant. 

After a pregnancy or childbirth, most women who went on to develop clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) did so about three years later than those who were never pregnant, a large and multicenter study reported.

Multiple pregnancies or births, however, were not seen to further affect CIS onset.

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Anokion Planning Launch of Phase 1 Trial of Investigational MS Therapy ANK-700

We know that with MS, our immune system attacks parts of our body that it shouldn’t attack. This investigational medication is designed to “reeducate” the immune system of people with MS so that it understands it shouldn’t attack healthy cells. Those at the company Anokion hope to begin a Phase 1 trial at several locations by the end of the year.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted an investigational new drug application (IND) for ANK-700, a treatment candidate for multiple sclerosis (MS) that is being developed by the Swiss company Anokion.

With this approval, Anokion can enter clinical testing and is planning to initiate a multicenter, Phase 1 clinical trial to evaluate ANK-700 in people with MS by the end of the year.

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