Multple sclerosis researchers win the Breakthrough Prize

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-multiple-sclerosis-oscars-science.html
Phys.org has a link to this article.  Multiple sclerosis was thought to be some type of autoimmune disease where the patients own immune defense system starts attacking specific tissue.  In this case neurons are attacked.  These researchers determined that B cells were involved when others were looking elsewhere.  B cells play an important part in our adaptive immune system.  B cells produce the near infinite array of antibodies, and when one gets selected as being potent enough they become memory cells and keep producing that same antibody, that is used to mount a rapid immune response if the antigen for that antibody infects the host again.  Previous infection with Epstein Barr virus is associated with inducing the autoimmune response that attacks the neural tissue.
A couple of decades ago another herpes virus (Marek's specifically HVT (Turkey hervesvirus) vaccine) was found to be associated with the autoimmune disease vitiligo (the immune system attacks melanocytes) when I was still at the University of Arkansas.  They had a line of chickens that were prone to acquiring vitiligo.  It was found that the line needed to be vaccinated with HVT before they would start to have symptoms.  Unvaccinated birds could go their whole lives without getting the autoimmune disease.  Another herpes virus was found to be associated with Alzheimer's around 5 years ago.
Herpes virus has some mechanism for evading our adaptive immune system. Virus like Marek's are never cleared from the birds.  They are suppressed, but the birds will shed infective virus for the rest of their lives.  It integrates into the genome and can pop out and start a replication cycle.  My take is that the virus messes with the system that screens antibodies as being self or foreign, and somehow mixes it's foreign antigens in with the antigens that have been determined to be self antigens.  There likely are individuals that have certain genetic variants that alter the sequence of the normally self antigens so that they get associated with the foreign antigens of the herpes virus.  The virus messes with the self recognition system designed to prevent autoimmune disease, and causes some host self antigens to produce an adaptive immune response.  The prediction would be that vitiligo or multiple sclerosis patients would share genetic variants involved in the self recognition process, and may also have a specific antigen sequence in melanocytes for vitiligo or neural tissue for MS patients.  Some protein in those cells gets misidentified as being a foreign antigen, and an adaptive immune response is mounted against that self antigen.
As a side note I am going off by myself on a road trip for the next couple of weeks, and likely will not be posting, since I never put Eternal September on my personal laptop.
Ron Okimoto