The ME Association (MEA) is pleased to announce that the Ramsay Research Fund will be providing some further funding to Dr Karl Morten et al in Oxford to continue their research involving Raman spectroscopy to find a diagnostic biomarker for ME/CFS.
The additional funding will be used to enable some further research to take place which will be aiming to validate the very promising findings that were published here:
Extracts
In this study, a single-cell Raman platform and artificial intelligence are utilized to analyze blood cells from 98 human subjects, including 61 ME/CFS patients of varying disease severity and 37 healthy and disease controls.
“With PBMC being an easily accessible target, we believe that Raman spectroscopy combined with advanced artificial intelligence could offer an affordable and non-invasive screening tool for ME/CFS when the condition is first identified.”
Huang, Morten, et al. Developing a Blood Cell-Based Diagnostic Test for ME/CFS Using Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells.
These results demonstrate that Raman profiles of blood cells can distinguish between healthy individuals, disease controls, and ME/CFS patients with high accuracy (91%), and can further differentiate between mild, moderate, and severe ME/CFS patients (84%).
This study presents a promising approach for aiding in the diagnosis and management of ME/CFS and can be extended to other unexplained chronic diseases such as long COVID and post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, which share many of the same symptoms as ME/CFS.