New Drug Therapy Found Promising in Treating MS : SCIENCE FILE: An exploration of issues and trends affecting science, medicine and the environment.

Greek and German doctors say they have come up with a revolutionary treatment for multiple sclerosis. “The new treatment was highly effective on people in the final stages of the disease who had tried every other method and had no results,” Dimitris Koundouris, a neurology professor at Greece’s Patras University, told a news conference.

Koundouris and Hans Kornhuber, the director of Germany’s Ulm University hospital, said their method was based on a combination of the cancer drug mitoxandrone and immunoglobins, which suppress production of white blood cells. The two doctors said they had tested the treatment on 320 people over a period of 18 months. “Fifty-eight percent of the patients showed a spectacular improvement, 40% had some improvement and the rest showed no improvement,” Koundouris said.