NCT05633875: IMAGINDEALinMS

Multimodal Imaging Signatures of the Biological Mechanisms Underlying Neurodegeneration in Multiple Sclerosis

Recruiting now Last updated 9 December 2025

What this trial tests

trial testing MRI in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in 80 participants. Currently enrolling.

Timeline

25 April 2023

Primary endpoint
25 June 2026

25 June 2026

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris
Status	Recruiting now
Study type	OBSERVATIONAL
Enrollment	80
Start date	25 April 2023
Primary completion	25 June 2026
Estimated completion	25 June 2026
Sites	1 location across France

Drugs / interventions tested

• MRI — full drug profile →

Conditions studied

• Multiple Sclerosis (MS) — all drugs for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) →

Sponsor

Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris — full company profile →

Who can join

18 and older, any sex, with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease of the central nervous system characterised by multi-focal inflammatory and demyelinating lesions disseminated in the brain and in the spinal cord. Impressive advancements in the treatment of the autoimmune component of the disease have been achieved during the last decades, leading to a drastic reduction of white matter lesion accumulation and relapse rate along the disease course. However, the development of treatments effective for preventing or delaying the neurodegenerative component of the disease, that underly disability accrual and progression of the disease, remains a major challenge. The development of novel therapeutic strategies for neuroprotection that target all patients with MS is a priority objective for research in the next years. The critical steps towards identifying treatments that prevent neuro-axonal damage include a deep understanding of the mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration and the development of reliable biomarkers for assessing the efficacy of emerging drugs and for accelerating their translation to clinical use.

The team of Prof. Stankoff has pioneered an innovative imaging approach combining positron emission tomography and MRI, and succeeded in generating individual maps or key biological processes such as endogenous remyelination, neuroinflammation, or early damage preceding lesion formation. Using these approaches, it has been shown that these mechanisms were influencing disability worsening over the disease course, but the investigators still lack long term longitudinal studies for the validation of these advanced imaging metrics as prognosis markers. Recently, preliminary results have also suggested that a multimodal combination of advanced MRI sequences may have the potential to reproduce some PET results.

In this project the investigators propose to unravel the predictive value of individual maps of tremyelination, neuroinflammation, and early tissue damage, on long term disability worsening and to develop a novel imaging approach that aims to capture remyelination of lesions, ongoing inflammation invisible on T1 and T2 MRI sequences (subacute/chronic active lesions) and to predict short-term future disease activity (identify prelesional areas), from a single multimodal MRI acquisition in patients with MS.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial.