Dr. Véronique Miron, the John David Eaton Chair in Multiple Sclerosis Research, has spent her career chasing a question she first asked as a teenager, when a magazine article about brain plasticity rerouted a future she had already mapped out for herself as a medical doctor.
“I didn’t even know that brain plasticity was a thing,” she says of what she read. “I always thought that the brain was static. And then I thought: if the brain is able to adapt, then could we harness that ability to try to repair it in disease.”
Since then, she wanted to be a scientist, even though she still knew almost nothing about neurodegenerative disease. Dr. Miron’s path sharpened not long after, when she met her now-husband’s aunt who had multiple sclerosis.
“She had talked with me about her experiences when she was a young mother,” Dr. Miron says. “She didn’t know what was going on, and a lot of her issues were actually chalked up to ‘women’s issues,’ and not taken seriously.” By the time she was finally diagnosed, all that was available to her was light physiotherapy, and disease-modifying drugs did not exist.
“The more I looked into it, the more I realized, this is really prevalent in Canada,” Dr. Miron says. “It’s targeting people at the prime of their lives.”
That growing awareness of MS merged naturally with her interest in neuroscience. She had always thought of neurological disease as something that came with age, she recalls. But she hadn’t realized how heavily it could fall on people at the prime of their lives—when they were still building their careers and raising families. She remembers being struck by how differently it was treated in public conversation compared with a disease like cancer, where research and fundraising drew far more attention.
“Since then, things have really changed,” she adds. “I think MS Canada does such a good job of engaging with the public. And now everybody knows what MS is. In Canada, everybody knows somebody with MS because it’s just so common.”
Bench to bedside at St. Mike’s BARLO MS Centre
Ask Dr. Miron what's changed since she entered the field, and she points to two things: a sharp rise in approved therapies—from two in 2004, when she started working as a researcher, to close to 15 today—and a profound shift in what researchers are trying to do.
For years, MS research focused on limiting the initial autoimmune attack; then focus began to shift toward the underlying neurodegeneration, and toward a harder question to address: could the myelin that MS destroys actually be regrown?
What Is myelin?Myelin is a fatty, insulating layer wrapped around axons, the long, thread-like fibers neurons use to send electrical signals to one another. Produced by cells called oligodendrocytes, it works much like the plastic coating on an electrical wire: it speeds up signal transmission and shields the fiber underneath.
In multiple sclerosis, the immune system mistakenly attacks and strips away myelin, a process called demyelination. This slows or disrupts nerve signals, causing many of the disease's hallmark symptoms: numbness, fatigue, vision problems, difficulty walking. But myelin loss on its own isn’t necessarily permanent. Left unprotected, however, the axon underneath becomes vulnerable, and over time it can begin to degenerate. It’s this damage that, unlike the loss of myelin itself, is irreversible.
That’s what makes remyelination, the brain’s ability to regrow lost myelin, so exciting. If new myelin forms quickly enough, the axon is protected before lasting damage sets in. Dr. Miron’s research asks how to help that repair process happen faster and more reliably, supporting a naturally occurring process that often fails with MS, and moving towards new therapies.
Early MS drugs worked by stopping the autoimmune attack that causes demyelination in the first place. Remyelination research asks a different question: whether myelin can be regrown quickly enough to protect cells before that damage sets in.
“That’s remyelination,” she says with excitement. “That’s almost the full focus of my work.”
Joining the BARLO MS Centre four years ago gave Dr. Miron something her research had been missing: direct access to the clinic and to MS patients.
“A big reason I wanted to join BARLO was to be closer to patients,” she says. “I wanted to actually interact more with people living with MS, not just study the disease from a distance.” For her, that meant getting findings out of the lab and into patients’ hands faster, describing the goal simply as going from “bench to bedside.”
That vision has already taken shape on several fronts: from regular interaction with BARLO patients to lab tours and public outreach like podcast interviews, to collaborating with other BARLO researchers who collect patient samples and link them to clinical measures like disability scores.
That foundation has set the stage for her latest publication, which looked at immune cells that travel from the blood into the brain in MS and found that, rather than helping, they make remyelination worse.
For years, researchers had assumed these cells, called monocytes, behaved the same way as microglia, the immune cells that live permanently inside the central nervous system and are known to protect and help repair myelin.
“The assumption made sense,” she says. “Since both cell types are macrophages and, once inside the brain, can be hard to tell them apart without specialized methods. It was assumed monocytes and microglia are doing the same thing, and monocytes are good for remyelination.” So, Dr. Miron and her team put that assumption to the test using experimental models that let them isolate monocytes specifically.
“We found that the opposite was true,” she says. Because monocytes circulate through the blood, unlike microglia, which never leave the central nervous system, the team could pull them directly from blood samples donated by people with MS and examine their gene activity. They identified a specific genetic signature linked to harm in remyelination, and when they compared that signature across patients, the pattern was clear: people with much worse disability carried far more monocytes.
Dr. Miron says the finding was only possible because of how BARLO links lab work to patient care, pairing gene activity data with real clinical disability scores collected by her colleagues at BARLO.
“Turning that discovery into a treatment starts with identifying a therapeutic target and, ideally, finding a drug already approved for something else that could be repurposed for MS,” she says. This is the strategy she is employing to follow up on her 2023 study that showed how low brain cholesterol prevents myelin repair. She has been talking with a company that developed a drug targeting brain cholesterol for Alzheimer’s disease. The company is now interested in diversifying into MS as well.
Before any MS-specific trial can begin, the company must complete its own phase one safety studies, confirming the drug reaches the central nervous system, establishing the right dosage, and ruling out toxic side effects. Once that safety profile is in hand, the next step will be finding funding to run a joint clinical trial for MS patients.
“We’re still a bit away from that,” she says, “But I think it’s encouraging that it’s in process, and drug companies like this are interested in diversifying their portfolio to include MS.”
Renewed Momentum Towards Discoveries in MS
It is a slow, deliberate path from research to a possible therapy, but it’s exactly the kind of progress BARLO was built to enable, and Dr. Miron describes her four years here as “a turning point” in her research.
Holding the John David Eaton Chair in Multiple Sclerosis Research, Dr. Miron says, has elevated her profile and opened leadership opportunities. In 2024, she was brought on as Vice-Chair of ACTRIMS, the largest MS conference in North America. In 2025, she took over as conference Chair. She also chaired the largest trainee conference in neuroimmunology, run by the American Society for Neuroimmunology, while sitting on the scientific committee for the largest neuroscience conference in Europe. She is now helping organize the MS Canada conference for the end of 2026.
What’s exciting about holding this Chair position is that I’m helping to shape the field," she says. "I can help decide the emerging topics and areas we need to develop in MS research, and interact with people that are doing this work.”
The past year brought three more distinctions for Dr. Miron: election to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, and an invitation to contribute to nominations for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
She’s quick to credit the people who made the Chair possible, naming, among many donors, the Eaton family, the Hall and Sloan family, the Barford family, and the Love family as crucial supporters of her work in many different ways.
What has struck her most, though, is the closeness of the entire BARLO community.
“I never had that kind of intimate, repeated interaction with people with MS, with volunteers, or with donors,” she says. “That’s been really special to me and to the researchers in my lab.”
Asked whether she’s still struck by what she read as a teenager about brain plasticity, Dr. Miron doesn’t hesitate for an example.
Her lab has captured brain plasticity and activity on film, with real-time video of microglia inside a brain slice, their thin arms extending and retracting as they constantly probe their surroundings, sensing whether something is wrong and needs their attention.
"We tend to think that everything is just static in the brain,” she explains. “But things are moving. Cells are so active. Things are being regenerated. Today I know that there’s even more plasticity in the brain than I ever imagined.”
Donate to St. Michael's Hospital Foundation.
