“We thought we might be able to intercept one of the signals that initiates the disease and that would then give us a clue on how to treat it,” Freedman said. He jokes that they “had, in effect, failed because the disease never came back. No one expected to see zero disease activity after the transplant.”
The procedure has its risks. One patient died in an earlier phase of the trial. It was in 2001 or 2002, Freedman recalled, saying the death was due to the pill form of the drug Busulphan. Used early on in the experiment, the drug attacks the liver twice, both when it enters the body and again when it leaves. But within a year, the team had found that a new intravenous version of the drug improved patient safety tremendously.
Freedman had the task of trying to scare patients by telling them the risks.
“My job was to talk everybody out of it,” he said. “It really is the hardest thing they’ll have to do in their lives. It is a bit of a gamble, but with the fantastic team we have in Ottawa, it’s less of a gamble.”
All participants showed dramatic improvement, and none reported relapses, according to a study on the Freedman-Atkins treatment by a team of MS researchers at the Neuro and the Université de Montréal.
Also, bone-marrow stem-cell transplants to treat MS are not approved outside of clinical trials because while the disease itself is not deadly, the procedure is fatal in as much as five per cent of patients.
But Freedman questions the risk rate. He says the five-per-cent figure was from data collected in the 1990s as the team prepared for the experiment. That number has since dropped to about one per cent, he said.