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Ron Davis latest: more evidence of "something in the blood" (Simon McG blog)

Simon

Simon

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Ron-Davis-©-Mark-Tuschman.jpg

© Mark Tuschman (with thanks for his permission to use here, and to @Rose49 for arranging it)

More clues are pointing to a role for blood plasma in ME/CFS. At a recent talk, Ron Davis presented data showing that ME/CFS cells behave normally in the nanoneedle test IF they are tested in healthy plasma. Also, red blood cells from ME/CFS patients are not as deformable as those from healthy people — but researchers only see the difference when cells are tested in their own plasma. Plus, a bigger and better pathogen hunt and another drug candidate emerges from nanoneedle testing.

Dr Ron Davis recently revealed more evidence supporting the idea that there could be "something in the blood" that drives ME/CFS.

He's been on a tour of the US East Coast, winning over scientists and clinicians, one lecture hall at a time.

Open Medicine Foundation has made available his talk at the Albert Einstein Medical Centre is now available. Much of the talk's content will be familiar to ME/CFS patients. I am highlighting here the things that appeared to be new and particularly interesting.

Something in the (blood) plasma
Previous work from Ron Davis and others has suggested that an unknown factor in the blood is driving ME/CFS and can cause healthy cells to behave like ME/CFS cells.

Davis had already reported striking nanoneedle results. The nanoneedle measures electrical changes in a sample of simplified blood (effectively just white blood cells in plasma).

What proved to be revelatory in ME/CFS was the nanoneedle salt stress test. This simply involves adding some sodium chloride (table salt), which forces cells to use energy (sodium enters the cell and is a little toxic to them, so they must use energy to pump it out again).

When salt is added to a sample of healthy control cells not much happens electrically. But when salt is added to an ME/CFS sample, electrical impedance shoots up, as the graph below shows. It does this for every patient tested (an initial sample of 20, then 26 more), and doesn't do this for every control tested to date.

Nano model results.png.jpg
Previously, he’d said that white blood cells taken from ME/CFS patients behave like normal, healthy cells if they are tested in plasma from healthy patients. Here, he presented data from one patient showing exactly that.

Plasma swap real data.png
As in the previous graph, impedance shoots up for ME/CFS in their own plasma, while nothing much happens for healthy cells in their own plasma (patchy yellow line – sorry, a poor quality screenshot of video). But when ME/CFS cells are tested in plasma from healthy patients (green line, indicated by the arrow), the ME/CFS cells now behave much like healthy cells


So, something in (or missing from) the plasma seems to be affecting cells, making ME/CFS cells act abnormally. And finding the something responsible for that could provide a big clue to understanding ME/CFS...

Read the full blog
 
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