Caitlin Astbury

For International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we’re meeting some of the brilliant women from the BartsMS research group at Queen Mary University London. Dr Sharmilee Gnanapavan is a neurologist who specialises in finding new ways of identifying MS progression.

We take a look behind the headlines to see what an mRNA treatment could mean for people living with MS. 

It takes a long time and lots of hard work to develop a new MS treatment. In 2019, ocrelizumab (brand name Ocrevus) became the first drug to be available for people with primary progressive MS on the NHS.

To help people at every stage of MS, we need to stop MS from progressing. Researchers are looking at three ways to do this. And we’ve now reached the point where there are clinical trials in progress for all three.

This year, many MS researchers have found themselves working from home. But that doesn’t mean they’re working alone. The world’s two biggest MS research conferences have joined forces to go virtual, giving researchers like Dr Veronique Miron from the University of Edinburgh the vital opportunity to share their results and collaborate.

We spoke to Professors Anna Williams and Charles ffrench-Constant to find about the potential to reverse myelin damage in MS.

Grace Birch is a PhD student at Imperial College London. We went to find out more about her work and her interest in MS research.

We know around half of all people with MS experience problems with cognitive processes. Researchers are working hard to understand more about how we can help people to manage cognitive symptoms of MS.

We're funding world-class research into new treatments and improved care and services for people with progressive MS.

You may have seen the suggestion that a vaccination for a common virus could stop MS. We look behind the headlines to see what the original research actually said. A recent paper suggests that MS could be caused by threadworms and Epstein-Barr virus – two common infections. But researchers didn’t present any new evidence and are just proposing it as an idea.

Alessandra Dillenburg, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, talks us through what can go wrong when media reporting on science doesn’t match up to the science itself.

With lots of different sources of evidence, from academic journals to newspapers and social media, it can be hard to figure out what to trust. PhD student Alessandra Dillenburg shares her top tips for assessing scientific evidence.

Recent media reports suggest testosterone plays a role in protecting men against MS. We look behind the headlines to see what the study actually showed.