From the Boots WebMS website, 23 September 2011 (story by Brenda Goodman, reviewed by Dr Rob Hicks)
23rd September 2011 — Researchers are disputing a 2009 study that found a virus in the blood of people with ME (chronic fatigue syndrome), which some hoped might have pointed to a cause of the disease.
The researchers, who were trying to confirm the 2009 study results, say they have failed to find evidence of XMRV infection in some of the same patients who were involved in the original study.
Additionally, some of the authors of the original study announced that they were retracting some of their results after finding evidence of contamination in some of their study samples.
Experts say the new study and partial retraction, which are published in the journal Science, should finally discredit the controversial theory that XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome.
“The original findings that led to the concern and the excitement that this is real aren’t reproducible,” says Michael Busch, professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and director of the Blood Systems Research Institute.
“I take that as an indication that those results are unreliable,” Busch says.
UK reaction
Dr Charles Shepherd, medical adviser to the ME Association in the UK said in a phone interview that although he believes a viral infection may trigger the illness: “it is now looking extremely unlikely that XMRV is either linked to ME/CFS or that it has a disease-causing role.”
However, the authors of the original paper, who were also involved in the new research, have a different interpretation.
They believe XMRV couldn’t be found in blood tests because it may hide in the body’s tissues, only rarely being picked up in the blood.
They point to recent studies in primates that were experimentally infected with XMRV. The infected monkeys were able to clear the virus from their blood within about a month, but it lingered in other tissues like the spleen and lymph nodes.
“All this study really says is that we can’t detect it in the blood reproducibly,” says Judy Mikovits, PhD, director of research at the Whittemore Peterson Institute, Nevada, US, which is dedicated to the research and treatment of neuro-immune diseases.
“The interpretation says that it’s not there or that it’s not a human infection, and there’s no data in this study or any other to support that,” she says.
Mikovits says she's just received a federal grant to continue her work on XMRV. “Clearly things aren’t over or they wouldn’t be awarding grants for people like us to study this virus and understand those questions,” she says.
Dr Shepherd says it's too early to make a final definitive decision on XMRV and ME/CFS: “We still need the results from the other major multi-centre study on XMRV and ME/CFS being carried out in America by Professor Ian Lipkin.”
However, he added that he now thought it unethical that some doctors abroad were still charging people for testing and treatment for XMRV.
I don’t think it’s helpful to repeat that a viral infection may trigger the illness because it infers that an infection is ONLY the trigger.
And if HGRVs do hide in the body’s tissues and are only rarely picked up in the blood, then the value of the biobank will be limited even though research will encompass virology.
No evident virus won’t mean no virus.
The catalogue of problems with the Blood working group are also hardly small. They are so numerous that it invalidates the paper. They gave the wrong name to the WPI/NCI finding. Instead they found human gammaretroviruses.
What are Boots bringing to the discussion?
The virus the WPI, NCI/Ruscetti, Lo and Hanson have all found was given the wrong name. It is a HGRV.
Not all controls were screened by all labs, the patients were all on medicines that would produce false negatives, no Trizol or equivalent preservative was used for PBMCs, which would prevent the WPI assays from working. Lo’s team made the mistake of using the assay that failed in Lo et al. and not the one proven to work, and Ruscetti never did any of the PCR.
Multi lab studies don’t seem to be easy to organise and the main people on this like Busch couldn’t have made worse mistakes.
Now we know all the negative papers have been looking for the wrong virus, using a clone (VP62) that doesn’t exist in the wild. What we do have is 3 positive papers.
What we need is studies on human tissue, not just blood, as the authors of the original XMRV study suggest. It is hard to understand how critics can so easily dismiss the activity of a virus just because it does not show up in blood.