A new and heartwarming article http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2014fall/immune-system-disruption.html by Kris Newby published in Stanford Medicine describes the exciting research being undertaken at Stanford. Both Dr Montoya’s ME/CFS Initiative and Mark Davis’s Human Immune Monitoring Centre are undertaking research which is throwing light on the underlying mechanisms of the illness and guiding treatment.
“Montoya’s chronic illness initiative is the largest project in the HIMC at this time, and the complexity of the task ahead is daunting. The staff is looking for meaningful patterns in the many components of the 600 blood samples, including dozens of cytokines, 35 cell-surface proteins, 15 or so types of blood cells, and more than 47,000 genes and regulatory nucleic acids. The challenge is not only to quantify the normal ranges for these components, but also to understand relationships between the components and reverse-engineer the cascade of biochemical reactions that drive immune system processes. He anticipates it will take about a year to run all 600 samples through the processes.”
Montoya achieved his first goal, the launch of the first major ME/CFS research initiative, with a little funding luck and the recruitment of a top-notch research team. With the assistance of Davis and his immune system hackers, he’s close to reaching his second goal: the identification of biomarkers and causes, which will enable physicians to provide a definitive diagnosis and treatment options to patients suffering from this debilitating condition.
The third goal of his hoped-for hat trick will be a whole new way to look at the human immune system. It’s a game changer. It will provide researchers with a new playbook of research strategies to help them discover the causes of other confounding conditions, from Lyme disease to multiple sclerosis to fibromyalgia. It will provide clinicians with a better set of metrics for assessing patients’ health. And then the patients lying in dark rooms with forgotten diseases, whose numbers could fill hundreds of soccer stadiums, will have reasons to stand up and cheer.”
Extracts from long article by Kris Newby http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2014fall/immune-system-disruption.html
The presentations from the Stanford ME/CFS Symposium can be watched at – http://mecfs.stanford.edu/2014SymposiumVideo.html