Now she [Ithaca College Professor Betsy Keller] is among the leaders of a new ME/CFS collaborative research center based at Cornell University and encompassing seven other institutions, including IC, funded with a five-year,
$9.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The center at Cornell is one of three that the NIH established last fall;the other two are based at Columbia University and the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Connecticut. A Data Management and Coordinating Center at Research Triangle Institute (Research Triangle Park in North Carolina), has also been awarded an NIH grant to manage the findings of the three centers.
Together the centersare undertaking a multifaceted five-year study that is arguably the most comprehensive research effort to date—some would say the
first comprehensive research effort to date—to find the cause of the disease.Keller leads the “clinical core”of the Cornell center’s initiative, leading a team that will collect VO2 max test and other data at the three sites—including IC—to feedthree investigations, twoat Cornell and one at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.