Pregnancy as a model of immune tolerance to identify biomarkers and new treatment targets in multiple sclerosis

Despite advances in treatments, many patients with MS continue to deteriorate due to inefficient therapeutic regimens and inadequate algorithms for personalised treatment.

Pregnancy represents a physiological state of transient immune tolerance, induced to avoid rejection of the semi-allogeneic foetus. Interestingly, chronic inflammatory diseases like MS improve during pregnancy.

The aim is to use pregnancy as a dynamic model for elucidating immune mechanisms leading to improvement and worsening of MS.

The goal is to use this knowledge to identify biomarkers for personalised treatment and to identify new targets for treatment, thereby aiming for precision medicine.

We will also elucidate underlying mechanisms of the pregnancy-induced improvement of MS, in particular related to pregnancy-associated hormones and immunomodulatory effects by placental-derived stromal cells and amnion epithelial cells, and evaluate their potential for future treatment.We will use blood samples longitudinally collected during and after pregnancy from patients with MS and healthy controls, and by in-depth multi-layer omics methods and a network-based bioinformatics approach, assess dynamics of cellular and molecular immune regulation.

The project is inter-disciplinary, involving systems biology, reproductive- and neuroimmunology.

The results obtained are relevant not only in MS, but also for other autoimmune diseases, as well as for understanding mechanisms involved in pregnancy complications.