PrecisionMS involves following participants for two years and collecting data from routine NHS investigations such as blood tests and brain scans.
The clinical course of MS, its relapse frequency and progression to disability are variable and unpredictable. This impacts on the ability to make decisions about the future.
Unfortunately, today, doctors are unable to predict at diagnosis who will have benign, aggressive or intermediate disease course. There is a need to develop tools to help us predict disease activity more accurately.
Over the past decade, there has been a revolution in the discovery of effective disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) for the treatment of MS. However, our current inability to predict MS activity and outcomes makes it difficult for the doctor and patient to decide on the most appropriate level of efficacy of DMT. There is therefore a need for predictive tools that can provide a personalised estimate of future disease activity. To be clinically useful, such “precision biomarkers” need be easily generated in a real-world clinical setting. This is the aim of PrecisionMS.
PrecisionMS is based on the findings of our FutureMS project, which has been following 440 people with MS in Scotland since 2016. FutureMS has allowed us to evaluate the predictive utility of two precision biomarkers: The first is serum neurofilament – an ultrasensitive blood test which allows brain proteins to be detected in blood. The second are markers derived from brain scans, for example, working out whether the brain has decreased in volume, called “brain atrophy”.
