Despite increasing insight into the underlying causal mechanisms of MS, faster and more accurate diagnosis and the development of therapeutic strategies further to years of intensive research have not yet enabled MS to be fully stabilised or cured.
Dendritic cells (DCs) are a specialised white blood cell population, the role of which is to switch the immune system on and off. Histopathological data and animal experimentation have also shown that the migration of DCs to the central nervous system and subsequent accumulation of these cells in the brain parenchyma play an important role in the disease process of MS. This means that the migration of DCs constitutes an interesting angle of attack for the development of new therapeutic strategies. Despite this, the transmigration of DCs through the blood-brain barrier has never before been studied in the specific context of MS. Thanks to the financial support of the Charcot Research Fund, we shall be the first to investigate the migratory capacity of DCs isolated from the peripheral blood of MS patients as well as healthy controls in an in vitro blood-brain barrier model. We shall also be analysing the differences between the phenotypes, gene expressions and T-cell stimulation capacities of DCs from MS patients and healthy controls, as well as between migrated and non-migrated DCs, with a view to identifying new therapeutic strategies which specifically target pathogenic migratory DCs.