Can a virus stabilize Multiple Sclerosis?

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative disease in which the neurons in the central nervous system (CNS; brain and spinal cord) cannot communicate effectively. The root of the disease is the degradation of the sheath of fat that surrounds some CNS neurons (myelin) - thus disrupting the effectiveness with which the neurons can survive and signal to each other. This destruction of the neurons is largely thought to be a result of the body attacking itself (an autoimmune disease), and not originating from an outside bacteria or virus; this hypothesis is largely the result of mice models that show that injecting components of this myelin sheath into a mouse will make the mouse exhibit MS-like symptoms.

Ref: http://health.howstuffworks.com/diseases-conditions/musculoskeletal/multiple-sclerosis1.htm

Although it seems as if this disease's cause is well-known and can be modeled well in animals, effective therapies to MS have proven hard to develop - one reason for this is that MS is different in almost every patient as to when it is symptomatic or not. This variation is so great that MS is characterized into many types of the disease such as relapse-remitting MS (RRMS) which the patient experiences many symptoms for months and then relapses into a largely symptom free condition, only to repeat in the future. Further, secondary progressing MS (SPMS) is a type of the disease - when symptomatic - declines at a devastating rate. There are more types, such as some that do not relapse and a continual decline is observed. It has been hypothesized that the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV; commonly known to cause mononucleosis) has some influence on this stability of disease - although results have not been very conclusive. This variability in the disease, as you can assume, confounds scientists researching therapies and potential cures to this devastating disease.

In hopes of elucidating why this variability is so great in this disease and if EPV has a role in disease stability, Annunziata et al in Italy investigated the role of EPV-positive B cells in disease severity. By extracting B cells from patients with MS, they examined the spectrum of antibodies that were produced by the MS patients of varying disease type. Initially, they identified 7 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that were found to bind a specific epitope (105-120) in one of the components of myelin that surround the neurons, MBP (myelin-basic protein). They chose this epitope of MBP because these mAbs were detected in the more 'stable' MS patients - and hoped to find something unique in these patients' body responses to the disease. Further testing included myelin-reactive T cells from MS to be evaluated in environments of the mAbs. Interestingly enough, only 3 mAbs showed dose-dependent inhibitory effects to the T cells - which are thought to contribute to the damaging environment in MS.