Michael Levy, MD, phD – Johns Hopkins University:
The short answer is yes. The long answer is we don’t know how that happens. For the most part, after a patient relapses and we suppress the inflammation, we don’t have a good sense of how the repair process works in the spinal cord and the optic nerves. We found that some patients have a miraculous ability to recover and to regenerate some tissue, and then some patients are devastated after a single attack and we don’t have a good sense of why that is. What we are working on are strategies to improve recovery after an attack, either using medications, combination with physical therapy, and more recently, using STEM cells to try to regenerate some of that lost tissue even long after an attack has devastated the spinal cord or optic nerve.