On Jan. 24, 2022, Atara Biotherapeutics, a leader in T-cell immunotherapy, announced that it had leveraged its novel allogeneic Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) T-cell platform to develop transformative therapies for patients with cancer and autoimmune diseases, today lauded the second high impact study this month solidifying EBV as the primary driver of the development of MS.

MS is a chronic neurological illness affecting an estimated 2.8 million people worldwide, including approximately 900,000 in the U.S. MS is driven by abnormally activated immune cells and subsequent inflammation which damages and ultimately destroys the protective myelin sheath surrounding nerve fibers in the central nervous system (CNS). While genetics and environmental factors play a role, it has long been postulated that EBV triggers the patient’s immune cells to erroneously attack myelin.

The study adds to the known EBV-MS epidemiological connection by providing a mechanistic basis for how EBV infection can trigger the patient’s immune cells to attack self-tissue in the CNS. These findings validate molecular mimicry as one of the leading mechanisms of EBV-mediated MS, which occurs when fragments of the virus share sequence or structural similarities with certain brain proteins. The immune system may mistake these “self-proteins” for EBV. These new data reveal how EBV infection can drive the development of antibodies that target both EBV and CNS proteins, potentially leading to MS. The paper, titled, “Clonally Expanded B Cells in Multiple Sclerosis Bind EBV EBNA1 and GlialCAM,” The study was published in the journal Nature.