Grant: Chair: CIHR Sex and Gender Science Chair - Infection and Immunity

Canada has one of the highest rates of MS in the world. At present, it is not possible to reverse the neuron damage in MS. Therefore, the best chance of curing this disease is to prevent it from starting in the first place. Thus understanding the risk factors for development of MS and the biology of how these risk factors initiate the disease process is an important area of research. Age of puberty has an impact on one's risk of getting MS. This is surprising since most MS patients do not experience their first clinical attack until aged 30. This suggests that there is a large disconnect between when the disease may get started and when it manifests into a clinical entity. Because of this, animal models of MS are critical to understanding and modeling how puberty and other factors including sex impact the initiation of this disease. The first goal of this Chair is to understand how puberty or ovarian function enhances immunity and initiation and autoimmunity. Being female is another MS risk factor. Women outnumber men with MS by 3-fold, and we still do not understand why this is the case. This higher female to male sex ratio in MS emerges with puberty, indicating that sex hormones produced by the gonads are responsible for the sex difference in MS incidence. A second goal of this Chair is to better understand the nuts and bolts of why the immune response is more vigorous in females through studies in an animal model of MS. We are pursuing the novel hypothesis that females are more prone to develop MS because they have more T cells that can recognize the myelin sheath. The final goal of this Chair is to explore how immune cells are different in men and women with established MS. This will be important to understanding another enigma in this disease, that men who develop MS are more prone to more disease progression. Altogether this research program has the high potential to increase our understanding of the role of sex and gender on the immune system and MS.