Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a long-term disease where the immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, leading to various symptoms.
While treatments targeting immune cells have improved outcomes for many people with MS, some still experience worsening symptoms over time despite these therapies. This suggests a need for better ways to track the disease and improve treatments.
This study looks at a type of white blood cell called ‘immature neutrophils’ in people with MS. Early research has found that people with MS have higher levels of immature neutrophils in their blood. Neutrophils are important immune cells that quickly respond to threats, but it’s not clear what role these immature cells play in MS.
Dr Stephanie Trend and her team aim to investigate the functions of these immature neutrophils and how they respond to current treatments. By learning more about them, the team hopes to find new targets for treatment, improve outcomes for people with MS, and develop better ways to manage the disease, especially in cases where it continues to progress even with treatment.
Dr Trend and her team have made strong progress in 2025 towards investigating how neutrophils may contribute to MS. Neutrophils are part of the body’s early immune response and can be involved in causing inflammation, but they are much harder to study than other immune cells and so are less well understood.
The team initially focused on improving laboratory methods so neutrophils could be studied more reliably. Because these cells are fragile, the team had to carefully refine their techniques before meaningful data could be collected. With these improved methods, the team has now successfully collected and analysed blood samples from people recently diagnosed with MS, as well as from people without MS.
A key achievement has been the successful use of advanced techniques that allow individual neutrophils to be analysed in detail. These analyses are technically complex but they produce high‑quality data, making this project one of the few studies that can examine neutrophils at this level.
Overall, this project has established a strong foundation for ongoing work aimed at better understanding how neutrophils may be involved in MS. Over the next year, Dr Trend and her team will recruit more study participants with and without MS. They will also finish analysing the features of immature neutrophils in the blood samples they have already collected. Additionally, the team will follow up participants with MS who joined the study in 2025, to study how MS disease activity and exposure to MS treatments affect the number of immature neutrophils over time.
Updated 31 March 2026Â
MSWA
$249,932
2025
3 years
Current project
