Md. grad student tries to stop effects of MS

Experiments with mice win a $15,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize

Crippled by multiple sclerosis, the lab mice’s hind legs and tails were limp with paralysis, but Lisa Tostanoski had an idea about how she could treat them.

With a tiny needle, the doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park injected the mice with a dose of timereleased medicine. Two weeks later the mice were scampering around their cages.

“They were able to stand up on their hind legs,” Tostanoski said. “We reversed the paralysis.”

The treatment, a complex combination of immunology and engineering, earned Tostanoski, 26, a prestigious LemelsonMIT Student Prize, awarded to her and eight other students and teams earlier this month. The prize for the most promising young inventors in America awards her $15,000 for her medical invention to reverse symptoms of debilitating autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Her novel approach has shown promise for developing treatments in an area that has long confounded researchers.

“If her invention that she’s working on proves successful, it’s a game changer,” said Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program. “She didn’t shy away from something that seems big and daunting.”

Autoimmune diseases occur when a person’s immune system mistakes healthy cells in the body for a foreign threat and attacks the tissue. With multiple sclerosis — a disease afflicting more than 2.3 million people worldwide — the immune system’s defense cells attack the fatty myelin sheaths that cover nerves. Researchers don’t know why these confused “T-cells” attack. But persistent barrages can damage nerves, causing muscles to weaken and stiffen, and lead to paralysis.

Doctors routinely treat multiple sclerosis patients with medicine to suppress the entire immune system and stave off attacks. But this strategy has widespread and often dangerous side effects in the body, and the benefits diminish over time.

Tostanoski, a McDonogh School alumna from Catonsville working in University of Maryland bioengineering lab, has embraced a different approach: transform the T-cells.

She began experimenting five years ago to develop a method to target the bad T-cells. Such a treatment would transform care for millions with multiple sclerosis.

“It’s the Holy Grail of MS. Finding the exact T-cells that are causing the disease and getting rid of them could be close to a cure,” said Bruce Bebo, executive vice president for research at the National