#024: Research on myelin repair – interview with Dr. Markley Silva Oliveira Junior on the effect of corticosteroid medrysone

Dr. Markley Silva Oliveira Jr. has done research on astrocytes and how they can contribute to better myelin repair for PwMS using Medrysone.

You can find the full transcript to read on the corresponding blog article: https://ms-perspektive.com/024-research-on-myelin-repair

Episode 23 is about an exciting research work on myelin repair in the progressive course of MS with the help of astrocyte cells that contribute to it under administration of Medrysone, a corticosteroid.

My interview guest is Dr. Markley Silva Oliveira Junior, who wrote his doctoral thesis on this topic at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. It didn't stop at writing alone, though; Markley did a lot of experimentation and found amazing things about astrocytes, whose impact used to be viewed rather negatively, but which make a crucial contribution to repair.

And since Medrysone is already an approved drug in the field of ophthalmology, it could go faster with the approval, if the successful results from animal experiments, are equally good for humans.

This episode was originally recorded for the German MS-Perspektive podcast in May 2023. As I feel, it is emotionally helpful to hear about research on myelin repair every now and then, I decided to publish it again for the international MS-Perspektive podcast.

The podcast and blog post are also available in German.

Introduction of Dr. Markley Silva Oliveira-Junior

Hi everyone. Just glad to be here in invitation from Nele, many thanks for having me. Well, I'm a very honored Brazilian guy, neuroscientist, married, I love a good hiking, travelling, good food (quite spoiled I am for being Brazilian, but France and Italy have my heart on that) and of course hangout with my friends and family.

How and where can interested people follow the most recent research activities?

In my LinkedIn I'm always sharing things that I found interesting about research. Sometimes, I do my own posts, otherwise I'm sharing what I think is interesting there. For me, if you're interested in MS, for example, the MS UK portal is one of the key ones to be looking into, if you are a layperson or if you are an expert. You can get things regarding to that. As a scientist, my key portal to be looking into is basically PubMed, but if you want to know more about what I'm doing, my LinkedIn is actually the best recommendation that I can do to follow what I've been working with. For example, I'm planning to do a post next week, where I will address a little bit more what I've been working with some clients, regarding Alzheimer's and also MS. I will not tell everything, of course, because of the patent issue and we are planning inside our company to start to share a little bit more of what we've been working, regarding health promotion, which is basically what we scientists are here to do. Even though we are in academia or not, we are here to promote health.

Is there anything else you would like to share with the listeners?

One thing in particular is that I love science communication, and I think this is really necessary to make science be better for everyone. And podcasts like the one that you have are actually giving people the opportunity to talk, is giving voice to express what they think about it. Every time that you listen, you will filter… you need to put something out of your mouth, out of your chest, do it kindly but always think about the audience. We, as scientists, we have changed the way that we talk about science over the years and I think that one of the things that makes me happy to be a scientist is how important science communication is today, so we can give people the right to know.

I think this is one of the most important things in science communication. It's giving the people the right to know. Because we, as scientists, back in years we were thought we were crazy guys, with "Eureka" all the time, living in a dark place, not sharing, or not knowing how to explain what we do to people, and this was actually what media put out about what being a scientist was. And we're not really like this. We're normal people, who like to go out … I think one of the things that your podcast gives opportunities to scientists is to talk more in a simple way about their work, about their research. Science communication is for this, is for everyone.

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Many thanks to Markley for the insight into the exciting research around astrocytes, their role in demyelination, and how to possibly stimulate them in the human brain using Medrysone.

Make the most of your life and become or remain a well-informed patient,
Nele

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