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Sign up! Your support could help win funding for a game-changing ME/CFS study (Simon McGrath's blog) NEW ACTIVE LINK ADDED - OPEN TO ALL THE WORLD

Messages
25
I live in the Netherlands but signed up anyway, it's very preliminary anyways so I thought why not, if it might help secure more research it can only be a good thing right?!
 

Simon

Senior Member
Messages
3,789
Location
Monmouth, UK
Thanks to Mary for posting, and apologies for being slow getting here (few health issues going on...).

Yes, people outside the UK can back it - though the study will start recruiting in the UK only and then expand to countries outside the UK if needed.

Meanwhile, here's a bit of the blog:

Sign up! Your support could help win funding for a game-changing ME/CFS study

DNA-blue-background R.jpg



Researchers and patients are about to submit an application to the UK’s two big medical research funders for a 20,000-patient genetic study. The team want people with ME to sign up to show funders that the community backs the study and that large numbers of people are ready to join it.

Your action today could help the world’s largest ME/CFS genetics study win funding – and could make a huge difference for patients, helping to identify biological causes of the illness and unlocking far more UK funding for biomedical research.

On 23rd January, the ME/CFS Biomedical Partnership made up of researchers, people with ME/CFS and carers, will make a grant application to the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research. The Partnership needs £3.5 million for a very large genetic study into ME/CFS known as a genome-wide association study (GWAS).

The project will be led by Professor Chris Ponting at the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the UK ME/CFS Biobank at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

A GWAS aims to uncover some of the biological roots of disease. By scanning the whole of human biology and probing small DNA differences among people, a GWAS can help to pinpoint the genetic causes of disease and then can help to guide drug development. This method has helped to identify genes – and the molecular and cellular pathways associated with them – that play a role in diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Type II diabetes. (See my blog about the science of GWAS).

Drug development is now under way in numerous diseases because of GWAS. This, and the identification of biomarkers, could happen for ME/CFS too.

Because researchers are looking at small differences, they need to look at DNA data from a lot of people. The ME/CFS study will recruit around 20,000 patients whose DNA will be compared with that of similar numbers of people who do not have the disease. The DNA will be extracted from saliva samples, and the study uses a “spit and post” design, so even people who are bedbound or housebound can take part.


Sign up!

3 more reasons to back the project
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Read the full blog