Five years after Jennifer Molson was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she needed a cane for walking and her boyfriend for just about everything else: bathing, dressing, even cutting her food into tiny pieces on their dinner dates.

Once an aspiring police officer, Molson could no longer work, drive or maintain her balance, sometimes wobbling like a drunken sailor. At 26, the future she once imagined was stolen, replaced by one spent in a wheelchair or worse.

But then, to her astonishment, Molson’s doctors found a way to steal it back.

“I had already accepted that this was what my life was going to be, with this level of disability,” said Molson, now 41. “But I got a second chance at life.”

In 2002, Molson became Patient No. 6 in a risky, experimental study led by Ottawa researchers that saw her immune system wiped out and regenerated through a stem cell transplant.

“We are rebooting the immune system like you might reboot a computer,” said Dr. Mark Freedman, a clinician-scientist with the Ottawa Hospital and the University of Ottawa leading the study.

On Wednesday, Freedman and his team finally published their results in the Lancet: Of the 23 Canadian patients who survived their treatments, not a single one has since developed new brain lesions or experienced a relapse.

Prior to enrolling in the study, all 24 patients had aggressive forms of the disease and collectively suffered from 167 relapses, or MS “attacks.” Twenty-three patients saw their disease go quiet without the help of drugs for between four and 13 years — longer than in any other study.

The other patient died from liver failure and sepsis caused by one of the drugs.

Remarkably, eight patients have even seen their disabilities improve, including Molson, the study’s most dramatic success story. Just 11 months after her stem cell transplant, Molson was walking down the aisle at her wedding.

Today, she kayaks, skis and drives to work in high heels — and 14 years have now passed since she last experienced any symptoms.

“The clinical results are truly impressive, in some cases close to being curative, though we need longer-term followup to know for certain whether the patients continue to do well,” Dr. Stephen Minger, a stem cell biologist who was not involved with the study, said in a written statement.

“For a lifelong progressive disease like MS with few treatment options this is really exciting data — it offers the hope of having a long-lasting treatment which may halt disease progression.”

Researchers caution that the study is still an early-phase trial, with just 24 patients and lacking a robust control group — this study will need to be replicated and expanded upon by other researchers.

The treatment is also dangerous. Molson was given a one-in-ten chance of dying — a risk many would consider unacceptably high.

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But Freedman, the study’s senior author, is convinced by the dramatic results he’s personally witnessed in his patients over the past 10 to 15 years. He is already using this stem cell treatment in patients for whom the benefits may outweigh its significant risks.

The basic strategy behind Freedman’s approach is nothing new. MS is an autoimmune disease that involves the immune system attacking its own central nervous system. Scientists still don’t understand the exact mechanism, so they have tried to counteract the disease by suppressing the immune system with chemotherapy drugs — and then regenerating it through a stem cell transplant.

But previous studies have seen mixed results, with the disease eventually roaring back. So Freedman decided to dial up his attack plan: instead of simply suppressing the immune system, he used a cocktail of three chemotherapy drugs to obliterate it completely.

“Our immune system fortunately has a way of remembering what it sees. If you see a virus, then the next time it comes into your body, you’re set up to take care of that virus,” Freedman explains. “In the case of an autoimmune disease, however, you want the immune system to forget (its target). So you have to wipe out the memory.”

The patients’ immune systems are then rebuilt from scratch using their own stem cells.

These cells are removed prior to the chemotherapy and purified through a specialized process that eliminates any straggler cells that might still be programmed to trigger MS.

In the early years of the study, Freedman — who has learned to be skeptical after decades in MS research — fully expected his patients’ symptoms to return.

“At about two or three years, I figured it would start to come back,” he said. “Instead, something very unusual started to happen: Patients started to get better. They started to recover.”

Not every patient has recovered as dramatically as Molson and seven saw their symptoms deteriorate even after the transplant — though this progression levelled off after about two years, Freedman said.

But he noted that every other study to date has seen some kind of inflammatory activity return — and none of his patients have seen any signs of inflammation following their transplants.

While he doesn’t consider this treatment a “cure” — that, to him, would be something that not just halted the disease but repaired any existing damage — he believes his study is a “proof of concept” that the treatment works.

And, of course, there’s no knowing whether the disease might come back for the study patients. But for Molson, who hasn’t had MS symptoms now for 14 years, she believes her disease has gone quiet once and for all.

“I live a fully normal active life now that 14 years ago I never, ever in my wildest dreams thought I’d be living,” she said. “This is a gift.”