Christopher Hemond
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an incurable disease in which the immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord. Patients have repeated bouts of inflammation as well as slow, steady loss of nerve tissue.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
multiple sclerosis
paramagnetic rim lesions
chronic active lesions
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Detect paramagnetic rim lesions on clinical 3T MRI using a susceptibility-sensitive T2-star phase sequence in a retrospective cohort of MS patients followed over time.
- Test whether paramagnetic rim lesions are associated with slowly expanding lesions, new cortical lesions and faster whole-brain atrophy, all markers of neurodegeneration in MS.
- Assess how disease-modifying therapies relate to paramagnetic rim lesions by examining individual patients' treatment histories.
- Measure lesion iron concentration as a gauge of inflammation, and track its change on different therapies, using quantitative susceptibility mapping in a prospective MS cohort.
More about the research
Most inflamed spots, called lesions, calm down soon after they appear. In about 40% of patients, however, some lesions stay active for years. These smoldering lesions may help drive the brain shrinkage seen in MS, which runs 2–4 times faster than normal. This project asks how to reliably detect these lesions with MRI, what harm they cause, and whether current treatments can calm them.
Why it matters
People with MS whose lesions stay chronically inflamed may lose brain tissue faster, but these lesions are hard to identify and their treatment is unclear. Establishing paramagnetic rim lesions as MRI biomarkers on clinically available scanners could help neurologists spot patients at risk of neurodegeneration. Tracking lesion iron could also show which disease-modifying therapies may calm smoldering inflammation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nian Wang
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Measure whole-brain myelin loss, iron imbalance and axon damage over time in cuprizone-treated Thy-1 YFP-16 mice, using quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and diffusion MRI models (DTI, NODDI, DKI).
Brian Gold
University of Kentucky, KY·Neuroscience
Test whether low blood-brain barrier water exchange, measured with the new DW-ASL MRI sequence, predicts growth of white matter hyperintensities over about 3 years in healthy older adults.
Neda Sattarnezhad Oskouei
Stanford University, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Characterize multiple sclerosis patient cohorts with proteomic analysis of anti-EBV antibodies and nerve-damage markers, to test how mimicry between EBV proteins such as EBNA1 and the brain protein GlialCAM drives MS.
The school
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School: 29 labs on PI Pages, $350M a year on research, 55 research doctorates a year.
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