“I had a dead leg and within the time it took me to have a shower, the other leg started getting a bit numb around the knee and two hours later, I was in St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, paralysed from just below the chest down.”
Queen’s Professor Denise Fitzgerald was diagnosed with Transverse Myelitis (TM) aged 21, an inflammatory spinal cord condition that left her paralysed. The rapid onset of symptoms began while overseeing a trampolining competition at University College Dublin (UCD).
Denise was sent for an MRI: Professor Hutchinson’s diagnosis proved accurate – and he assured her it wasn’t Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The significance of this only became clear to Denise as she learned about MS, a life-long condition, in her later work. Denise remembers focusing on how quickly she could get back to trampolining as she had a competition coming up in Scotland. But first she had to learn how to walk again.
“I was ridiculously positive; I’m a ‘glass-half-full’ person”. Although unfazed, she had no real understanding that full recovery was not guaranteed.
After initial recuperation with physio and water therapy, it took about a year before Denise was able to walk without crutches. And while she suffered from incredible fatigue, being a young student, Denise was keen to get back to life in Dublin. She made lots of adaptations to her life to make sure she had the independence she needed and she is indebted to her PhD mentor, Prof Alan Baird, who supported her return to her PhD studies, which coincidentally was investigating inflammation.
“I was really lucky with my outcome and I’m always sensitive that people who have MS have a lifelong condition, and they don't see improvements in certain phases of their disease, they only see deterioration.”
Denise’s personal experience sparked a passion for research into neurological recovery. After training in Ireland, she secured a position in Philadelphia under the mentorship of Prof Abdolmohamad Rostami and Dr Bruno Gran, in the Dept. of Neurology and at Thomas Jefferson University.
Then a job came up in Queen’s that met with Denise’s growing ambition to focus on research. She says:
“One of things that attracted me to Queen’s was that it was a research-intensive position. A lot of other positions are more balanced towards the teaching than the research but if you're spending a lot of time teaching, you have less time for research. So, this was a path I now knew I wanted – that is, the time for research.”
Once at Queen’s, Denise took a major risk by shifting the focus of her research. "Existing drugs for MS were reducing inflammation but not repairing damage," she explains. "So, I changed direction to study how the immune system could help repair damage it had caused."
Just as funding was running low, her team made a breakthrough. They discovered that a specific type of immune cell can signal to brain stem cells to repair myelin, the protective layer around nerves that is damaged in MS.
"If we understand this process, we can use this knowledge to develop drugs to trigger repair when it fails," she says.
Denise credits the strength of the research to her team who are always looking at ways to do things differently. Dr Yvonne Dombrowski, a key research leader was instrumental in these early discoveries. She is also incredibly grateful for the “extremely generous support” from experts such as Professor Robin Franklin from University of Cambridge and the pioneering MS researcher, Professor Dame Ingrid Allen.
Ingrid’s legacy is not just in her support, drive and pioneering work for women researchers, she also left a legacy gift in her will which has enabled further MS research.