Dr. Stephen Hauser was a young resident at Harvard when he met his first patient with multiple sclerosis, a woman with a thriving professional life who’d been completely wiped out by her condition, paralyzed on one side and unable to speak.

It was heartbreaking, he recalled. He was struck by how cruel the disease seemed, how it could crush the lives of young patients. He pledged to tackle a disease that at the time had almost no treatment options.

That was more than 40 years ago, and a therapy that Hauser championed — through repeated setbacks and the discouragement of people who didn’t believe what he was doing would work — has now completely altered the course of multiple sclerosis for the most common form of the disease. 

Drugs targeting the B-cell culprits in the relapsing form of MS can leave patients essentially symptom-free. Millions of people worldwide are on the drugs, the first line of which were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2017.

And relapsing MS “is now in the rearview mirror,” said Hauser, a neuro-immunologist and head of UCSF’s Weill Institute for Neurosciences.