ME Association Comment
This is welcome news that builds on existing research and has the potential to develop treatments. We send congratulations to the research team at Cornell and look forward to reviewing their results in due course.
“This is welcome news that builds on existing research and has the potential to develop treatments. We send congratulations to the research team at Cornell and look forward to reviewing their results in due course.”
Russell Fleming
Head of Communications. The ME Association.
Article Extracts
A Cornell multidisciplinary research center that studies chronic fatigue syndrome has received a five-year, $9.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease – funding that will enable experts from disparate fields to work together on the mysterious and debilitating condition.
The Cornell Center for Enervating Neuroimmune Disease, established in 2017, ultimately seeks to understand the biological basis and develop a treatment for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a disabling disorder for which there are currently no effective therapies.
ME/CFS affects an estimated 3 million people in the United States and some 65 million worldwide, causing some to be ill for decades and unable to work. The disease leads to overwhelming fatigue that rest does not alleviate. Symptoms may include brain fog, body pains, headaches, difficulty sleeping and prolonged increases in symptoms after mild physical exertion or exercise.
“What is desperately needed in ME/CFS are effective treatments that not only improve certain symptoms, but actually ameliorate the whole disease, so that people can get their lives back,” said Maureen Hanson, Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), who is the center’s director and co-principal investigator of the grant, which starts on April 1.
The current grant will focus on 3 areas of research:
- Analyse gene expression in muscle biopsies.
- Analyse RNA released into blood plasma when cells die, before and after exercise.
- Isolate and characterise gene expression in monocytes (a type of immune cell) and platelets.