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A highly effective new treatment for multiple sclerosis was approved yesterday by the European Medicines Agency, the regulator for drugs in Europe.

The drug can offer people with early multiple sclerosis many more years free from worsening disability, and Oxford played an important role in the drug's development.

Professor Herman Waldmann was involved in the early discovery work with the antibody drug at Cambridge University and brought a significant proportion of the research to Oxford when he moved here in 1994.

Once in Oxford, his team worked on the manufacture of the drug, contributed important new understanding of how the drug worked, and investigated the drug's application in a number of disease areas.

Cambridge continued to lead the clinical trials of the new drug in multiple sclerosis, and it is these which have now seen the drug approved by the European regulator.

The newly approved drug is called alemtuzumab and is made by the drug firm Genzyme, which will market the drug under the brand name Lemtrada.

'We are very pleased and proud of this outcome,' said Professor Waldmann. 'In particular, we have great admiration for the neurology team in Cambridge, with whom we have worked on this project for so many years. Their commitment and focus has been exemplary, and this has been a good example of basic and clinical science collaboration at its best.'

Although now approved for use in the EU, it still remains to be determined whether this drug will become a common treatment option for NHS patients, as the drug has not yet been assessed by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis affects 2.5 million people worldwide and approximately 100,000 people between the ages of 20-40 years in the UK. The disease sees the patient's own immune system attack their nerve cells, resulting in symptoms including numbness, tingling, blindness and even paralysis. Although some recovery may occur, the majority of patients relapse and then see repeated relapsing and remitting stages. Current treatments require frequent administration and are only moderately effective, reducing the relapse rate by only approximately 30%.

Alemtuzumab has the potential to make a great difference to patients, in terms of a better quality of life and not having to take treatments continuously.

'It is the first drug for multiple sclerosis that only needs to be given for a short course to provide long-term benefit,' explained Professor Waldmann, though the drug does need to be given before the disease has progressed too much.

The drug offers people with multiple sclerosis an improvement in their ability to function in their daily lives, a significant slowdown of disease progression and fewer disease relapses, he says. 'It compares favourably in terms of efficacy to most of the current treatments.'

Alemtuzumab reboots the immune system by first depleting a key class of immune cells, called lymphocytes. The system then repopulates, leading to a modified immune response that no longer attacks myelin and nerves as foreign.

But in doing so, roughly one third of multiple sclerosis patients develop another autoimmune disease after alemtuzumab, mainly targeting the thyroid gland and more rarely other tissues especially blood platelets.

Dr Alasdair Coles of the University of Cambridge explains: 'Alemtuzumab offers people with early multiple sclerosis the likelihood of many years free from worsening disability, at the cost of infrequent treatment courses and regular monitoring for treatable side-effects.'

The Cambridge research team is currently investigating how to identify people who are susceptible to this side-effect and seeing whether this side-effect can be prevented.

It was soon after the Nobel laureates Cesar Milstein and George Kohler invented the technology for making large quantities of monoclonal antibodies at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology that Herman Waldmann and others in Cambridge produced the first monoclonal antibody for potential use as a medicine. This antibody, then called Campath-1H and now known as alemtuzumab, was subsequently licensed for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

In the 1980s, the scientists also began to explore the drug's use in autoimmune diseases, which occur when the body's immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue.

'By applying the drug in leukaemia, vasculitis, bone marrow and organ transplantation, we learned lot about how to use it, and this was the background for the application in multiple sclerosis,' explained Professor Waldmann.

Through the 1990s, while Cambridge neurologists began to explore the use of alemtuzumab as a treatment for multiple sclerosis, the Therapeutic Antibody Centre at the University of Oxford led by Professor Waldmann – a unique facility at the time – permitted the development and manufacture of alemtuzumab for clinical trials.

And through this partnership between Oxford and Cambridge, it was determined how the drug worked and its advantages in multiple sclerosis became clear.

Professor Alastair Compston and Dr Coles of Cambridge University led the subsequent clinical research to develop alemtuzumab in partnership with Genzyme.

Professor Compston said: 'This announcement [by the European Medicines Agency] marks the culmination of more than 20 years' work, with many ups and downs in pursuing the idea that Campath-1H might help people with multiple sclerosis along the way. We have learned much about the disease and, through the courage of patients who agreed to participate in this research, now have a highly effective and durable treatment for people with active multiple sclerosis if treated early in the course.'

The science of how rubbing a balloon on a woolly jumper creates an electric charge may help to explain how volcanoes generate lightning.

Volcanic plumes play host to some of the most spectacular displays of lightning on the planet but, whilst there are many theories, the exact mechanisms behind these natural light shows, and why some volcanoes see more lightning than others, are a mystery.

In a recent study published in Physical Review Letters researchers from Oxford University, and the Universities of Bristol and Reading, investigated what role volcanic ash particles rubbing together might play in making lightning bolts.

I asked Karen Aplin of Oxford University's Department of Physics, a co-author of the study, about volcanic lightning and how it can give insights into volcanoes on Earth and even other planets…

OxSciBlog: What do we think causes lightning in volcanic plumes?
Karen Aplin: Lightning in volcanic plumes is not completely understood, but there are several ideas about how it might work. Lightning is a giant spark that fires when large quantities of electric charge build up. Thunderclouds are made of water, ice and hail, and the electrification arises from collisions between light particles (ice) moving upwards in the cloud, and heavier water drops falling.

One way lightning in volcanic plumes could be generated is from ash particles colliding with each other. This is similar to the electric charge that can be generated by rubbing a balloon on a jumper.

Another way lightning can occur in volcanic plumes is from some volcanoes, like Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, that have glaciers on top of them. When the volcano erupts, the glacier melts, which both causes huge floods and makes a big cloud of ice and water that becomes mixed with the volcanic plume. This mixture of cloud and plume can generate volcanic lightning by ice, water, and ash collisions in what's called a 'dirty thunderstorm'.

OSB: How did you set out to study the role of ash particles?
KA: We were interested in measuring the electric charging from ash particles colliding with each other. To do this, we dropped small samples of ash through a tube and measured the electric charge on the ash when it lands on a detector at the bottom of the tube. As the ash falls it rubs against other ash particles, and transfers electric charge (like the jumper and the balloon).

This experiment, carried out under controlled conditions in the lab at Oxford Physics, is the closest we can get to copying how the ash behaves in a volcanic plume. We took special care to make sure unwanted effects, such as the ash rubbing against the sides of its holder, were as small as possible so that we only measured the electric charge generated from the ash rubbing against itself.

The ash samples we tested were from the Icelandic volcanoes Grímsvötn and Eyjafjallajökull, and were generously given to us by the Icelandic Met Office. With the help of our colleagues in Earth Sciences and Geography at Oxford we measured the sizes of the ash particles, and sieved the ash to separate out the particles of different sizes, so we could understand how the size of the ash affected the electric charge transferred.

 OSB: What do your results reveal about how variation in ash particles affects lightning?
KA: We found that some ash particles became more electrically charged than others, and that the size of the ash particles was important. If the particles have a wide range of sizes, they charge better than particles that are all of similar size.

Particles with the biggest difference in size from the largest to the smallest charged best of all. This suggests that frictional charging from particles rubbing together will be quite efficient in the plume near the volcano, where lightning is observed.

We also found that ash from different volcanoes had different electrical properties. For example, the ash from Grímsvötn charged up much more easily than the ash from Eyjafjallajökull. This is particularly interesting, as the Grímsvötn eruption produced much more lightning than Eyjafjallajökull. We don’t yet know why this is, but our lab measurements may be a first step towards understanding what part the properties of the ash play in volcanic lightning.

OSB: How could these findings help in the remote sensing of volcanic activity?
KA: Firstly, motivated by the dramatic lightning from the Grímsvötn eruption, the Icelandic Met Office is experimenting with lightning detection to provide additional early warning of eruptions. A better understanding of how volcanic plumes become charged could reduce false detections of volcanic lightning, and perhaps provide more information on the progress of the eruption.

Secondly, our results explain our previous curious observations, obtained with weather balloons, of electric charge within plumes distant from the volcano. This charge was unexpected, since the electricity on the particles when they were near the volcano should decay away relatively quickly.

Our results show that when the ash particles of different sizes rub against each other anywhere in the plume, they become electrified. Knowing that all plumes are very likely to be charged, no matter how far away from the volcano, means that we can start to develop new techniques to distinguish between clouds and volcanic plumes, the separation of which is crucial in mitigating hazards to aircraft.

OSB: What can they tell us about volcanism on other planets?
KA: Our findings are not limited to just terrestrial volcanoes. They are another step towards confirming that volcanic lightning occurs in planetary atmospheres.

One reason why this is important is that chemicals generated by lightning have been linked to the origins of life, so any planet that might have lightning may yield fundamental answers to some of the biggest questions there are. Electromagnetic signals from lightning also look promising for detecting volcanic activity as space probes fly past.

Top image: Lightning bolts in a volcanic ash cloud, Eyjafjallajökull Glacier, Iceland, via Shutterstock. Middle image: ash particles from Icelandic volcanoes used in the study.

A report of the research, entitled 'Triboelectric Charging of Volcanic Ash from the 2011 Grímsvötn Eruption', is published in Physical Review Letters. 

Bees and other pollinators aren't just pretty creatures, they work for us.

In 2009 it was estimated that services provided by pollinators are worth an annual £510m in crops to the UK. That's why declines in many insect pollinator populations are a worry for economists and politicians as much as ecologists.

Take the bumblebee: the number of species has declined across Europe in the last 60 years and in Britain at least two species are thought to have gone extinct. Many other specialist pollinators are threatened and no one knows what effect this will have on overall pollination services.

There have been many theories about what's causing the decline and how we might halt it: recently insecticides called neonicotinoids have been suggested as a prime suspect but parasitic mites (Varroa destructor) and fungal disease (Nosema ceranae) have also been in the frame, not to mention the widespread destruction of pollinator-friendly habitats, such as wildflower meadows.

At an event in the Houses of Parliament this afternoon, UK politicians can find out about the current evidence concerning pollinator decline and what might be done to stop it. The event and accompanying POSTnote are the work of Rory O'Connor, a DPhil student at Oxford University's Department of Zoology and the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

'The idea of POSTnotes is that they are an unbiased source of the best information about a topic and explain the science in a clear and understandable way,' Rory tells me. 'This is challenging when it comes to pollinator decline as there are opposing views, with neonicotinoids being a particularly controversial issue. What I had to do was go back through all the scientific evidence, summarise it, and then present it in just four pages.'

One of the big problems is how much we still don't know about pollinator populations. 'How do you monitor insect pollinator populations effectively? Which pollinators provide pollination services to which crops or wildflowers? In a lot of cases we don't know,' Rory explains. 'There's already some ongoing research into this but it's still early days and it's a fast-changing area, but then this is part of what makes it exciting to investigate!'

Rory's usual area of study is butterflies, so branching out to research a wide range of pollinators was quite a departure. The opportunity to work in Westminster came when he was awarded a British Ecological Society Fellowship at POST.

The event and publication of the note marks the end of his Fellowship but Rory comments that he's learnt a lot from it: 'My writing has improved, as has my analytical thinking and ability to synthesise a lot of complicated information – all particularly useful skills to hone for when I'm writing up my thesis. The simple but important things, like my confidence in asking questions and talking to people about my work and ideas, have also improved. I've also learnt a lot about the tremendously important world of insect pollinators.'

So what have we learnt about how to save the bees?

As well as the need to improve our fundamental knowledge of the role of insect pollinators and monitoring populations, the evidence Rory has gathered suggests that conserving and creating pollinator-friendly habitats could be crucial in providing refuges for at-risk species to feed and nest.

One answer could be to build on and extend current initiatives such as the UK government's 12 Nature Improvement Areas, Wildlife Trust's Living Landscapes, and the B-Lines project in Yorkshire, where farmers create corridors linking pollinator habitats. England's 402,000 km of hedgerows could also be used to provide new habitats.

Let's hope that the Westminster hive-mind can find an answer to the question of how to protect such valuable and productive insect species.

Female red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken, may be able to optimise the immunity of their offspring by selecting sperm after mating with different males.

That's the conclusion from a study led by Oxford University researchers published in this week's PNAS.

'In natural populations, males can coerce females and selecting sperm after mating with multiple males is a safer way to control offspring paternity for a hen,' explains Dr Tom Pizzari of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, one of the research team.

Whilst previous work has demonstrated that hens are able to select against the sperm of related males after mating, quite what triggers this response is a mystery.

The team focused their efforts on the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), a gene complex that plays a key role in immune responses. 'Similarity at the MHC between two individuals is often a good proxy for their overall relatedness,' Tom tells me.

In the study the team looked for evidence of sperm selection after both natural matings and artificial insemination. Whilst there was strong evidence for sperm selection in the natural matings, evidence of this occurring with artificial insemination was much weaker.

'During natural mating hens appear to be able to assess their relatedness and genetic similarity with prospective partners,' comments Tom. 'One possibility is that the genetic profile of an individual at the MHC may be associated with olfactory cues, but the extent to which olfactory cues mediate kin recognition in birds remains unclear.'

The team's results suggest that hens may preferentially retain the sperm of males with a MHC different from their own. This could mean that rather than selecting sperm merely to avoid the risk of inbreeding, hens may select sperm in order to optimise the MHC diversity of their offspring, which translates into better immunity against a wider range of pathogens.

The findings are not just relevant to junglefowl or chickens:

'Mechanisms of female sperm selection are widespread, yet their functional significance has remained elusive,' Tom tells me. 'The results of our study suggest that some of these mechanisms may have evolved to allow females to optimise the genetic diversity of their offspring after mating with multiple males. These results may therefore have relevance for breeding programmes in animal productions and conservation biology.'

Scientists as eminent as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan have long believed that humans will one day colonise the universe. But how easy would it be, why would we want to, and why haven't we seen any evidence of other life forms making their own bids for universal domination?

A new paper by Dr Stuart Armstrong and Dr Anders Sandberg from Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) attempts to answer these questions. To be published in the August/September edition of the journal Acta Astronautica, the paper takes as its starting point the Fermi paradox – the discrepancy between the likelihood of intelligent alien life existing and the absence of observational evidence for such an existence.

Dr Armstrong says: 'There are two ways of looking at our paper. The first is as a study of our future – humanity could at some point colonise the universe. The second relates to potential alien species – by showing the relative ease of crossing between galaxies, it makes the lack of evidence for other intelligent life even more puzzling. This worsens the Fermi paradox.'

The paradox, named after the physicist Enrico Fermi, is something of particular interest to the academics at the FHI – a multidisciplinary research unit that enables leading intellects to bring the tools of mathematics, philosophy and science to bear on big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects.

Dr Sandberg explains: 'Why would the FHI care about the Fermi paradox? Well, the silence in the sky is telling us something about the kind of intelligence in the universe. Space isn't full of little green men, and that could tell us a number of things about other intelligent life – it could be very rare, it could be hiding, or it could die out relatively easily. Of course it could also mean it doesn't exist. If humanity is alone in the universe then we have an enormous moral responsibility. As the only intelligence, or perhaps the only conscious minds, we could decide the fate of the entire universe.'

According to Dr Armstrong, one possible explanation for the Fermi paradox is that life destroys itself before it can spread. 'That would mean we are at a higher risk than we might have thought,' he says. 'That's a concern for the future of humanity.'

Dr Sandberg adds: 'Almost any answer to the Fermi paradox gives rise to something uncomfortable. There is also the theory that a lot of planets are at roughly at the same stage – what we call synchronised – in terms of their ability to explore the universe, but personally I don’t think that’s likely.'

As Dr Armstrong points out, there are Earth-like planets much older than the Earth – in fact most of them are, in many cases by billions of years.

Dr Sandberg says: 'In the early 1990s we thought that perhaps there weren’t many planets out there, but now we know that the universe is teeming with planets. We have more planets than we would ever have expected.'

 A lack of planets where life could evolve is, therefore, unlikely to be a factor in preventing alien civilisations. Similarly, recent research has shown that life may be hardier than previously thought, weakening further the idea that the emergence of life or intelligence is the limiting factor. But at the same time – and worryingly for those studying the future of humanity – this increases the probability that intelligent life doesn't last long.

The Acta Astronautica paper looks at just how far and wide a civilisation like humanity could theoretically spread across the universe. Past studies of the Fermi paradox have mainly looked at spreading inside the Milky Way. However, this paper looks at more ambitious expansion.

Dr Sandberg says: 'If we wanted to go to a really remote galaxy to colonise one of these planets, under normal circumstances we would have to send rockets able to decelerate on arrival. But with the universe constantly expanding, the galaxies are moving further and further away, which makes the calculations rather tricky. What we did in the paper was combine a number of mathematical and physical tools to address this issue.'

Dr Armstrong and Dr Sandberg show in the paper that, given certain technological assumptions (such as advanced automation or basic artificial intelligence, capable of self-replication), it would be feasible to construct a Dyson sphere, which would capture the energy of the sun and power a wave of intergalactic colonisation. The process could be initiated on a surprisingly short timescale.

But why would a civilisation want to expand its horizons to other galaxies? Dr Armstrong says: 'One reason for expansion could be that a sub-group wants to do it because it is being oppressed or it is ideologically committed to expansion. In that case you have the problem of the central civilisation, which may want to prevent this type of expansion. The best way of doing that get there first. Pre-emption is perhaps the best reason for expansion.'

Dr Sandberg adds: 'Say a race of slimy space aliens wants to turn the universe into parking lots or advertising space – other species might want to stop that. There could be lots of good reasons for any species to want to expand, even if they don't actually care about colonising or owning the universe.'

He concludes: 'Our key point is that if any civilisation anywhere in the past had wanted to expand, they would have been able to reach an enormous portion of the universe. That makes the Fermi question tougher – by a factor of billions. If intelligent life is rare, it needs to be much rarer than just one civilisation per galaxy. If advanced civilisations all refrain from colonising, this trend must be so strong that not a single one across billions of galaxies and billions of years chose to do it. And so on.

'We still don't know what the answer is, but we know it's more radical than previously expected.'