Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1989. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The Associated Press - Friday, January 27, 1989
E. Prem Kumar Reddy, a researcher at Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, said the genetic study of blood samples from six multiple sclerosis patients provides "direct proof" that a virus called the human T-lymphotropic virus, or HTLV-I, which is similar to the HIV virus that causes AIDS, is involved in the MS disease process.
"This test for the first time shows that if you do sensitive enough assays, you can find HTLV in MS patients," Reddy said in an interview. The same tests on 20 healthy people, he said, detected the virus in only one.
A report on the study will be published today in the journal Science.
Both HTLV-I and the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, are retroviruses. Reddy said both of the viruses also appear to infect immune cells in the blood.
"Even though these two viruses are not causing the same disease, their basic mechanisms of infection are very, very similar. Something that works for HIV should also work for HTLV-I," Reddy said.
Multiple sclerosis is a disease that attacks the brain and other parts of the central nervous system. It causes damage by destroying a tissue called myelin that covers the nerves. There are about 250,000 MS patients in the United States. The disease strikes most frequently between the ages of 20 and 40. There is no cure.
Reddy and his associates at Wistar proved that there is HTLV-I in the blood cells of multiple sclerosis patients by performing extremely precise test for the genetic pattern of the virus. As a control, similar tests were performed on blood samples from 20 healthy people, 10 from Sweden and 10 in Philadelphia.
The HTLV-I genetic pattern was found in each of six multiple sclerosis patients tested at the University of Lund in Sweden. Of the 20 healthy subjects, Reddy said the HTLV-I genetic pattern was in only one.
Reddy said the research proves that HTLV-I is "associated" with multiple sclerosis, but it does not prove that the virus, by itself, is the cause of the disease.
Dr. Byron Waksman, vice president for research and medical programs at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in New York, said, "This is an important study. It could lead to an important shift in how we approach and treat this disease."
But more work is needed, he said, to determine the precise role that HTLV-I plays in the MS disease process.
Waksman said that if later research proves that HTLV-I is an essential part of the MS disease process, then "you could do all the things (for treatment) that people talk about doing with AIDS."
This could include drugs to block the mechanism the viruses use to infect and damage cells.
Reddy said the next step in his research is to study brain tissue in an attempt to determine how HTLV-I affects the nervous system "on a molecular level."
"Once we understand that, then we could develop a pharmacological agent that would block this process," he said. The researcher said developing a drug against HTLV-I or to treat MS directly will take "a number of years."
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