About CA$1.35 million ($1.07 million) has been invested in a project that seeks to understand the effects of multiple sclerosis (MS) on a group of people with pediatric-onset disease as they move into adulthood.
The three-year investment was from Biogen Canada and Roche Canada — each providing about CA$500,000 (nearly $400,000) — and the Brain Canada Foundation, which is giving around CA$350,000 (nearly $280,000).
Two large MS initiatives — the Canadian Prospective Cohort Study to Understand Progression in Multiple Sclerosis (CanProCo) and the Canadian Pediatric Demyelinating Disease Study (CPDDS) — will join for the project, in which the effects of childhood-onset MS are assessed as the children age.
Various factors will be evaluated over time, including physical disability, cognition, brain structure, life quality, and capacity for work and educational achievement.
“On behalf of the CanProCo team, we are pleased to welcome this collaboration to further our knowledge of pediatric-onset MS and to provide important insights for all people living with MS as they age,” Jiwon Oh, MD, PhD, CanProCo’s lead investigator and medical director of the BARLO MS Centre at St. Michael’s Hospital of Unity Health in Toronto, said in an MS Society of Canada press release.
“This research will serve as an invaluable resource for the national and international MS research community, providing implications on how we effectively treat, manage, and identify factors of MS progression across the disease spectrum, beginning at the earliest onset of the disease,” Oh added.
While MS usually affects adults, up to an estimated 5%–10% of MS cases may be diagnosed before age 16. These patients may have an altogether different disease trajectory than people with adult-onset forms of the disease.
Over the last 16 years, CPDDS has followed individuals with pediatric-onset MS and myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody disorders (MOGAD) — a related condition — to generate a large patient dataset including clinical, imaging, immunological, and genetic information from more than 700 participants. The program is led by Brenda Banwell, MD, and supported by MS Society of Canada’s Multiple Sclerosis Research Foundation.