Ionis, leading MS researcher throw antisense at a new type of brain cells
No matter how many molecules he threw at them, Paul Tesar couldn’t get the brain cells to survive. Or he got them to survive, but then — to everyone’s bafflement — they still couldn’t do what they were supposed to.
Tesar, a professor of innovative therapeutics at Case Western University, had spent years building stem cell models for multiple sclerosis, growing brain organoids in dishes and then seeing what small molecules restored myelin production. Now he was trying to do the same for other myelin diseases, particularly an ultra-rare genetic condition called Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, where a single mutation leads to the death of the myelin-producing neurons, called oligodendrocytes, and can kill patients in infancy.
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