Enabling precision medicine in multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a debilitating disease, mainly affecting young people and women. Untreated, it leads to severe disability and premature death.

The cause of MS is largely unknown and there are no biomarkers for diagnosing MS early, known risk factors provide no information regarding severity/progression of MS and the pathophysiology of MS remains poorly understood.

The purpose of this research program is to enable precision medicine in MS by identifying novel metabolic and lipidomic diagnostic/prognostic biomarkers and develop models that provide individual patients predictions with a valid measure of their confidence.

This project capitalizes on novel methods to characterize the entire set of metabolites, lipids and proteins in bodily fluids, well-defined case-control cohorts (>7,600 individuals), including a wealth of clinical, genetic and environmental factors and the developments in computational and machine learning methods that have made it feasible to manage, process and interpret complex data.We anticipate this project to be instrumental in realizing precision medicine in MS, enabling tailored interventions to the individual patient.