Fig. 7.

The abundance of M-MDSCs in the peripheral blood of MS patients is indicative of a better relapse recovery in MS. a Representative flow cytometry plots for M-MDSCs in human PBMC samples. In both control and MS patients, live MNCs were gated after removing cellular aggregates and death cells based in ZombiNIR expression. Next, immature myeloid cells were gated from monocyte subpopulation as CD33⁺HLA-DR^−/low populations. CD33⁺HLA-DR^−/low-cells were assessed for CD14 and CD15 expression to identify the M-MDSC subset defined as CD14⁺CD15⁻ (in this panel, the percentage of M-MDSCs refers to MNCs). b The abundance of M-MDSCs measured in MS patients at an early stage of their disease course was significantly higher than controls. c The M-MDSC load in human peripheral blood was inversely correlated with the time elapsed from the first relapse to sampling. d M-MDSCs were more abundant in MS patients at the time of their first referred relapse (≤ 30 days after the relapse) than in controls and MS patients in remission (> 30 days after the relapse). In the sub-cohort of MS patients in relapse, the abundance of M-MDSCs at baseline was inversely correlated with the EDSS at baseline (e) and with the EDSS 1 year later (f). g Only those MS patients at relapse with full recovery (with an EDSS of 0 at 12 months) had a higher proportion of M-MDSCs than healthy controls. Control in b and g N = 26; MS in b and c N = 47; MS ≤ 30 days in d–g N = 30; MS > 30 days in d N = 17. Full recovery N = 15 and partial recovery N = 15 MS patients in g