Invest in ME has just announced the line-up of speakers for its 7th international ME/CFS Conference which will be held in Westminster on Friday, 1 June 2011.
One of the event's star performers of recent years, Dr Judy Mikovits, has not been included in the conference programme so far, although the organisers say additional speakers will be announced.
Lined up so far are:
* Dr Donald Staines, associate professor at Bond University on Australia's eastern ‘Gold Coast'. He is a public health specialist who says communicable diseases as well as post infectious fatigue syndromes are his main research interests.
* Professor Olav Mella and Dr Øystein Fluge from the University of Bergen in Norway, who are returning for a second year to discuss their important studies into the use of the anticancer drug rituximab as a treatment for certain types of ME/CFS.
* Dr Sonya Marshall-Gradisnik, associate professor of biochemistry, Bond University. A neuroimmunologist, much of her work related to autoimmunity in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
* Professor Hugh Perry, a member of the UK Medical Research Council's Expert Group on ME/CFS, from the University of Southampton. His field is experimental neuropathology and he investigates inflammation in the central nervous system and its contribution to neurological disease.
* Dr Mario Delgado, head of the department of immunology and cell biology at the Institute of Parasitology and Biomedicine in Spain. As a neuroimmunologist, his main research focus has been to understand the bidirectional communication that exists between immune and neuroendocrine systems.
* Dr Daniel Peterson, who has followed a cohort of patients with ME/CFS since the outbreak 25 years ago in Incline Village, Nevada, and who recently helped set up Simmaron Research since his departure from the the whittemore-Peterson Institute. Dr Peterson has close links with Bond University where he is adjunct professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine.
* Dr Ian Gibson, former dean of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia and until recently a British Member of Parliament.
To register for the conference, please click HERE.