 I'm Dr. Jessica Fletcher, and I'm a research fellow at the MENSI's Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania. My team and I are incredibly grateful to the Brain Foundation for funding our research. We're investigating the genetic pathways that cause brain dysfunction in multiple sclerosis or MS. To do this, we've studied families that have an unusually high incidence of MS to identify changes in genes that only occur in the family members that have MS. This Brain Foundation project is the next step in our research, but we're using cells that have been donated by the family members of MS that we can grow in the lab and transform into different types of brain cells. We are now using these cells to investigate whether the changes in the genes we've identified contribute to the development of multiple sclerosis. We hope that our approach will result in the first ever cell-based model of multiple sclerosis that we can use to develop new brain repair therapies to improve the lives of people with MS.