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ME / CFS Research Newcastle · 1,275 like this
12 minutes ago ·
The last few weeks have been occupied with some serious grant writing. We have submitted a large grant to the MRC and another to a scheme called NIHR EME. So we have our fingers tightly crossed that there will come off.
Getting the funding to 'do' the research takes an awful lot of time so although both of these grants are outline applications they have take lots of meetings, discussion and write and rewrites of the content.
Even for outlines a full costing is required, and this means you need to know exactly what you would like to do if you are successful so that you can accurately cost the application. Otherwise if you get the costs wrong you might not have enough funding to actually do the project if you are successful.
So fingers crossed for these .. Will be great if we are successful.
One of the current MRC projects is coming to an end soon and we are just recruiting the last few participants. We need at this stage to also include some nonCFS people who we can use as a comparator group. We need to be sure that they match our CFS group as near as possible - so that can be a bit difficult sometimes to get absolutely right.
The Action for ME funded sleep studies are now finished and the analysis is complete - Zoe has written the first draft of the paper for submission for publication in a scientific journal and we have a group meeting on weds to finalise this before we end it off.
It's really important that the work we do is not done in isolation and that the findings are disseminated to both the people who have taken part and also clinicians who see patients. It's only that way that the research can change how we manage patients.
Next step for these studies is a small intervention study (funded by ME association) where we are going to look at whether treating sleep problems improves fatigue.
A few months ago one of the team working on the muscle studies came to see me because after completing their PhD they moved to a lab working on skin cells. SJ thought that the novel studies of mitochondrial she was doing in skin could easily be done in muscle cells too.
She knew that we had muscle cells in the lab from CFS patients and wanted to see whether I thought it would be a good idea to look at them too. I found a small amount of funding for her to perform these pilot studies and she emailed last week to say that she was very excited about the results. We are meeting up to look at the results on Thurs ... So more of that soon...