Congratulations to our employee of the month, Jennifer Norman! Jennifer has worked tirelessly as our comptroller to secure funding for expansion and to manage the human resources needs of our ever-growing staff. Moreover, as a first for our organization, Jennifer deferred the honor to recognize her colleague, Umar Sadiq, for all of his work.

Congratulations to both of them!

Dr. Andrew Sylvester presented the following article at Journal Club this week: “Differential effects of fingolimod (FTY720) on immune cells in the CSF and blood of patients with MS” by Kowarik et al in Neurology (2011). The discussion focused on the effect of fingolimod on various immune cell types in the brain and cerebrospinal fluid.

Dr. Subramaniam Sriram, from Vanderbilt University, spoke at Grand Rounds this week. His topic was the role of the innate immune system in the development and pathogenesis of MS and he spoke a good deal about his research on nitric oxide. Following his presentation, we discussed how Methotrexate modulates nitric oxide pathways and may be an additional mechanism of its benefit in progressive forms of MS. We will be supplying Dr. Sriram with frozen CSF samples of patients before and after...

After speaking with the FDA, they have asked for additional long term safety experiments in a larger animal model.  This process will occur over the course of 2 years and cost an estimated 3 million dollars.  We are now going to start the process of obtaining funding to conduct these experiments.

We thank you for your understanding and hope you will help support our ongoing research at MSRCNY.