Just like electrical wires, nerves have insulation - but instead of plastic, the body uses myelin.
However, MS patients would still have the problem of their immune system attacking their myelin.
With MS, the protective layer around nerves, known as the myelin sheath, becomes damaged.
In the case of myelin, the water in healthy tissue flows along well-defined channels.
Sickly myelin, however, is mushier, so the water in it tends to move around at random.
The disease hinders development of the myelin sheath, a fatty covering that protects the brain's nerve fibers.
Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease (PMD) is one of many leukodystrophies in which patients struggle to produce the myelin sheath.
One possible cause of slow transmission might be that the myelin insulation surrounding those fibres is faulty.
The next step was to transform the stem cells into immature versions of cells in the brain that produce myelin.
When these cells had been injected into mice born without any myelin it had had a significant effect, said researchers.
The disease is caused by producing too much of a protein needed in myelin, which then becomes stuck inside the cells.
Dr Steven Goldman told the BBC that "myelin was produced throughout the nervous system" and some mice had achieved "normal life spans".
In MS, the protective sheath or layer around nerves, called myelin, comes under attack which, in turn, leaves the nerves open to damage.
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However, diseases that result in damage to the myelin, including MS, leave the nerves exposed and electrical signals struggle to travel round the body.
He developed an antibody to an unknown protein in the myelin.
Unlike nerve cells in the rest of the brain which are covered with protective myelin, the nerve cells in the retina are bare with no myelin coat.
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He founded the Myelin Repair Foundation in 2001 to focus doctors on the idea that myelin, the coating that is stripped off nerves by ms, could be regrown.
Using the stem cells, researchers have developed cells called oligodendrocytes, which are precursors to nerve cells and which produce a protective layer around nerve cells known as myelin.
Patients: essentially absent (I suspect in future years, forward-thinking disease foundations such as the Michael J Fox foundation and the Myelin Repair Foundation might find the dialog especially useful).
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In MS the damage to myelin exposes channels on the surface of the axon, allowing potassium ions to leak out and thus dissipate the electrical current that carries nerve signals.
In the late 1980s a young neuroscientist named Martin Schwab, now a professor at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, suspected the culprit was the spinal cord's myelin, the insulating sheath that surrounds nerves.
The retinal nerve fiber layer is the one part of the brain where nerve cells are not covered with the fat and protein sheathing called myelin, making this assessment specific for nerve damage as opposed to brain MRI changes, which reflect an array of different types of tissue processes in the brain.
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