Journalist and Producer Richard M. Cohen spoke to Newsweek about the importance of finding a cure of MS, and innovative treatments to help alleviate symptoms and slow disease progression. You can read the full piece on Newsweek, here. 

"We were at the Tisch MS Research Center of New York, where Cohen is one of the first 20 or so patients to be enrolled in a stem cell therapy treatment pioneered by Dr. Saud A. Sadiq, whom Cohen had met at a conference. The therapy, still in the early stages, harvests stem cells from subjects' bone marrow and transforms them in a laboratory into "neural progenitors." Injected into the patient's spinal fluid, the neural progenitors could eventually lead to the repair of the myelin sheaths in the brain, an organ Cohen calls in his book "that exotic place just north of the neck."

Cohen has been chronicling his struggle with MS on a blog called Journeyman. There, he wrote of his first treatment from Sadiq, which was so uncomfortable he joked about it being "in violation of the Geneva Conventions." Despite the discomfort, the trial appears to be safe. Whether it is effective remains unknown: One critic, Dr. Sally Temple of the Neural Stem Cell Institute, has said that it "is unlikely that these cells will replenish lost neural cells," because harvested neural progenitors aren't exactly like those native to the body. But after four decades of fighting his own brain, Cohen is willing to take chances, even those that involve long dates with long syringes.

Sadiq's effort is part of a broader push to understand neurological disorders that affect the structure of the brain. As the baby boomers pass into senescence, more and more of that generation's members will be felled by disorders like MS, Alzheimer's (which affects 5 million Americans) and Parkinson's (1 million)."