P2RY12 and multiple sclerosis: Furthermore, a study by Beaino et al. (2017) has demonstrated that P2X7R is associated with a pro-inflammatory phenotype of human microglia, and P2Y12R is associated with an anti-inflammatory phenotype in postmortem tissues of multiple sclerosis patients, suggesting P2Y12R and P2X7R are promising targets for discriminating microglial phenotypes in vivo by PET imaging.