Two of the UK’s largest public funding agencies announced this week that they would provide £3.2 million (around $4 million at current rates) for a study that will analyze genetic material from as many as 20,000 people to search for underlying causes of myalgic encephalomyelitis. The Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research are providing, respectively, £1.8 million and £1.4 million to support the project, called
DecodeME.
While this sum represents a significant investment, it is still much less than the £5 million that the MRC and other government agencies spent on the now-discredited PACE trial more than a decade ago. Contrary to the expectations—and claims—of the PACE investigators, that piece of crap documented pretty authoritatively that cognitive behavior therapy and graded exercise therapy are not effective treatments for ME (or chronic fatigue syndrome, the term they favored.)
The new study is what is called a genome-wide association study, or GWAS. Here’s how lead investigator Chris Ponting, a professor of genetics at the University of Edinburgh, described the approach in
a press release from the research team:.....................
