From time to time, hopes of a breakthrough in the fight against major diseases are made public, raising expectation among sufferers and their families.

Yet all too often it is a false dawn, with the treatment failing to live up to the hype or the cost making it unfeasible to develop.

So while there must be caution with the announcement that a team of Bristol scientists has developed a treatment for the debilitating condition MS, there is also exciting potential.

MS is a particularly cruel disease which strikes people in the prime of life and which can hang over them like a time bomb for up to 50 years.

The one thing most people with MS can be sure about is that the condition will get worse.

Eventually sufferers move from having attacks to a situation where the problem is there all the time.

This puts a huge burden on carers and leaves the person with MS unable to function as they would wish in society.

The simple approach is to say a treatment is needed which either halts the progress of the disease or even reverses it.

Easy to say. Not easy to achieve.

But for five years, Professor David Wynick and his team at Bristol University have been conducting painstaking experiments on a protein called galanin.

They believe that increasing the levels of this protein in the brains of MS sufferers could slow down or reverse the progress of MS.

It will be hard work, with a treatment possibly a decade away.

And the team will need funding in the order of £15 million.

Every one of the 85,000 MS patients in the UK and their families will be hoping Prof Wynick and his team are given the resources to carry on their good work.