£622,000 grant to improve diagnosis and treatment for ME/CFS and Long Covid

Moved post

OXFORD, BRISTOL, EDINBURGH, UK – 15 December 2023 – Leading computational biology company PrecisionLife®, which is driving precision medicine in complex chronic diseases, the ME/CFS charity Action for M.E., and the MRC Human Genetics Unit at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer, University of Edinburgh have been awarded a £622,000 grant by Innovate UK's Advancing Precision Medicine programme to improve diagnosis and treatment for the millions of people affected by ME/CFS and long Covid.

ME/CFS and long Covid are debilitating conditions profoundly affecting the quality of life of over two million people in the UK. PrecisionLife’s platform recently identified the first reproducible genetic associations with ME/CFS1 and long Covid2. Before then, little was known about the genetic causes of either disease, which have no effective diagnostic tools or disease modifying therapies.

The LOCOME (LOng COvid and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis diagnostics and stratification) project will extend PrecisionLife’s previous analyses to include deeper multimodal data for a wider group of patients from long Covid datasets and the world's largest study of ME/CFS, led by the DecodeME Partnership, which includes Action for M.E. and the MRC Human Genetics Unit.

PrecisionLife will use its precision medicine and mechanistic patient stratification approach to identify the factors driving disease in different patient subgroups through combinatorial analysis of the DecodeME data. The insights and biomarkers that this generates will be used to create the first predictive diagnostic tools to rapidly triage people presenting with potential ME/CFS or long Covid symptoms and identify novel repurposing opportunities to accelerate access to disease modifying treatments for patients


https://precisionlife.com/news-and-...gnosis-and-treatment-of-me-cfs-and-long-covid

 

• This is an Innovate UK grant, made to speed up the shift from biological findings to drugs by encouraging companies to get involved early and take risks
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  Innovative precision medicine project to diagnose ME/CFS and long Covid more accurately and find the most appropriate treatment options for patients.
  
  
• PrecisionLife will perform combinatorial analysis on long Covid datasets and the world's largest collection of ME/CFS patient data [ DecodeME] to identify the mechanisms causing the diseases.
  
  
• The project builds on previous studies into ME/CFS and long Covid undertaken by PrecisionLife in collaboration with Action for M.E. and University of Edinburgh.

https://www.bioindustry.org/news-li...improve-diagnosis-and-treatment-of-mecfs.html

https://twitter.com/user/status/1735688565693055310

 

What exactly is precision life? They seem to be doing excellent work, but more on the fundamental research side of things, which seems rather unusual for a company.

 

Precision Life are an interesting company specialising in computational biology. They have developed a new way of analysing existing genetic data called combinatorial analysis. Instead of looking to see a particular DNA difference is linked with disease, it looks to see if combinations of DNA differences are linked to diseases. This is inherently a better way to identify genetic links to disease.

What they do that is clever (and proprietary) is the way they do the calculations. They probably isn’t a super computer big enough in the world to do every calculation you need to do in theory. They have developed a clever way that allows them to “search the computational space“, without doing every calculation.

Does it work? It’s a black box method, which obviously raises doubts. But the results they hayproduced to date suggest they are doing the right thing.

However, this is just the starting point.

They aim to make money from pharmaceutical companies , helping those companies, identify drugs (existing, in development or part of every Pharma’s collection of interesting compounds) that could treat chronic illnesses. Precision life work on the basis that neglected chronic illnesses are actually a huge market for drugs.

precision life work to identify relevant DNA differences – and do more clever computational work to go from DNA differences to identifying drug targets. That information is of potentially huge commercial value to drug companies.

apologies for such a long answer!

 

Thanks for explaining

 

In Germany there's also a large study called BOSCO which is generally looking at all outcomes to Covid. I can't see whether their classification of Long-Covid is useful enough to reveal anything about Long-Covid, but they at least are looking at it (translated from homepage) "The extent to which genetic factors in the affected individuals are responsible for Long COVID is also still unclear at present. We are investigating this question via a second questionnaire, which we may send out at a later date." Might be worth keeping an eye on...

 

I do not claim to fully understand the complexities of the genetics. However, as Simon describes, this project seems to be a collaboration that has the potential to cover the one big uncertainty in the standard GWAS approach. Which sounds a brilliant development - sharing resources. It is not unusual for truly innovative science groups to form commercial set ups, especially in the US.

As I see it:
It is possible that DecodeME will show no links to single genes and that might be taken as useful evidence of a lack of genetic causation. Family clusters might arise other ways. But the weakness in that argument is that the problem might be a mismatch between two or more genes. There is a system that ought to suffer from diseases generated this way - the NK cell system, although it is not clear that we have found any such diseases yet.

NK cells recognise other cells using lock and key receptors and strangely we are born with whatever locks and keys we inherit from mum and dad and some of them may not fit each other. The lock is an HLA Class I molecule on a tissue cell and the key is an KIR receptor on an NK cell. The NK cells go round checking cells are healthy using these. It seems that all of us probably have enough locks and keys that fit for the system to work but it does seem a rather haphazard design.

An example of where we do know of a disease due to two genotypes is Rhesus disease in newborns - but there the incompatibility is between the mother's and the baby's genotypes. It would not be so surprising if there was a way to get incompatibility within a single person's genotype - as in the NK story above.

The combinatorial approach may have its statistical problems but those ought to fall out with replication cohorts.