Simon
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A team led by Edinburgh University’s Professor Chris Ponting has won funding for a PhD student who would follow up and expand on remarkable recent findings made at Stanford University where Dr Mark Davis may have pinpointed a major issue in the immune system in ME/CFS.
Last year, Davis produced strong evidence of T cell clonal expansion, similar to that seen in illnesses including multiple sclerosis and acute Lyme disease. His discovery came from a new and sophisticated way of looking at the immune system in ME/CFS, that revealed the strongest evidence yet for immune activation in this disease. These results could indicate autoimmunity or a response to infection in ME/CFS, and could point to the core problem in the disease.
Human T cell (photo: NIAID)
So if the results of the PhD work are as hoped then they could narrow down the cause of ME/CFS for some patients. The ultimate aim is for this research to form part of a concerted effort that provides affordable diagnostic tests and targets for treatment.
The PhD will be based at Ponting’s Computational and Disease Genomics lab in Edinburgh. The £90,000 cost of the PhD will be jointly funded by Action for ME and the Scottish Government’s Chief Scientist’s Office. Samples from patients will be provided by the UK ME/CFS Biobank, subject to a successful full application to the Biobank.
Ponting has drawn in impressive collaborators for this project: senior immunologist Professor Georg Höllander from Oxford University and molecular biologist Dr Lia Chappell from the prestigious Wellcome Sanger Institute. I am pleased to say that I have also been involved with this study from the outset and the successful PhD candidate will engage with more patients as the project gets underway.
Read more
A team led by Edinburgh University’s Professor Chris Ponting has won funding for a PhD student who would follow up and expand on remarkable recent findings made at Stanford University where Dr Mark Davis may have pinpointed a major issue in the immune system in ME/CFS.
Last year, Davis produced strong evidence of T cell clonal expansion, similar to that seen in illnesses including multiple sclerosis and acute Lyme disease. His discovery came from a new and sophisticated way of looking at the immune system in ME/CFS, that revealed the strongest evidence yet for immune activation in this disease. These results could indicate autoimmunity or a response to infection in ME/CFS, and could point to the core problem in the disease.
Human T cell (photo: NIAID)
So if the results of the PhD work are as hoped then they could narrow down the cause of ME/CFS for some patients. The ultimate aim is for this research to form part of a concerted effort that provides affordable diagnostic tests and targets for treatment.
The PhD will be based at Ponting’s Computational and Disease Genomics lab in Edinburgh. The £90,000 cost of the PhD will be jointly funded by Action for ME and the Scottish Government’s Chief Scientist’s Office. Samples from patients will be provided by the UK ME/CFS Biobank, subject to a successful full application to the Biobank.
Ponting has drawn in impressive collaborators for this project: senior immunologist Professor Georg Höllander from Oxford University and molecular biologist Dr Lia Chappell from the prestigious Wellcome Sanger Institute. I am pleased to say that I have also been involved with this study from the outset and the successful PhD candidate will engage with more patients as the project gets underway.
Read more
