CLEVELAND, Ohio -- One of the most promising and exciting treatment avenues for multiple sclerosis is the use of a patient's own stem cells to try to stop -- or even repair -- some of the disease's brain tissue damage.

But injecting a patient with a dose of his or her own bone-marrow stem cells was actually a pretty crude method of treating the disease, because no one was quite sure how or why it worked. Last year, doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center and Case Western Reserve University began trying this for MS patients in a Phase 1 clinical trial after positive results were seen in mice.

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the myelin sheaths that surround and protect nerve cells. When myelin is damaged, the nerve cells are exposed and unable to do their job, which is sending signals to the brain and back.

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