Simon McGrath explores the big biomedical stories
Dr Ron Davis has won a large NIH (US National Institutes of Health) grant for an immunology project with a strong focus on HLA genes. Which may have led some to wonder, ‘What are they?’ HLA (human leukocyte antigen) molecules play a critical role in the immune system, particularly by activating T cells. There is …
Continue reading Dr Ron Davis’s big immune study is looking at HLA genes. Here’s why.
Guest blog by Professor Chris Ponting and colleagues. UK Biobank - a national biobank different from the ME/CFS biobank - has data from around 500,000 individuals, including both healthy people and those with one or more of the many different diseases in the UK population. About 2,000 people in the sample reported that they had …
A team led by Edinburgh University’s Professor Chris Ponting has won funding for a PhD student who would follow up and expand on remarkable recent findings made at Stanford University, where Dr Mark Davis may have pinpointed a major issue in the immune system in ME/CFS. Last year, Davis produced strong evidence of T cell …
Continue reading A plan to replicate Mark Davis’s remarkable findings of immune activation in ME/CFS
When I got ME more than 20 years ago, I thought that science would soon provide the answers to my illness. Instead, I saw little good research going on, and there’s been a spectacular lack of progress since then. We have no treatments and still don’t even know what causes the disease. Why not? The …
Continue reading There’s a yawning gap in ME/CFS research funding. Take action.
Things are changing in the US for ME/CFS research as four new collaboratives set up and get to work. In September last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced $35 million of funding to establish three new ME/CFS research collaboratives and a supporting data centre. Since then, the Open Medicine Foundation (OMF) has helped …
Continue reading A new research landscape emerges in America
The CFS/ME Research Collaborative has belatedly recognised the critical importance of focusing on biomedical research to uncover the biological mechanisms behind ME/CFS. Its controversial deputy chair, Prof Esther Crawley, is standing down and will be replaced by biomedical researcher Prof Chris Ponting. The Collaborative has started taking concrete action to engage with patients and has also announced ambitious plans to enable much more biomedical research in the UK. [read more]
Analysing PACE the way the authors originally promised to do showed that CBT and GET didn't do much to improve self-reported physical function and fatigue and did not lead to recovery. Even the very limited self-reported gains in this unblinded trial are likely to be illusory because they are not backed up by meaningful gains in objective measures, such as fitness. The self-report gains also appear not to last. We now need biomedical research to pave the way for effective treatments.
