Australia: 2022 The CHROMIC Study - Understanding ME/CFS and discovering new treatments through repurposed pharmaceuticals - recruiting

Understanding myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and discovering new treatments through repurposed pharmaceuticals - The CHROMIC Study
Deakin University, Australia

From the application form linked above:

The aim

This study aims to improve the understanding of the disorder as well as to look for new treatments for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)

Who can participate?
- Individuals with a diagnosis of ME/CFS
- Individuals with no known disease (healthy controls)

- Surveys will be done online at your own pace
- Only ONE appointment needed to take part
- The study involves donating a blood sample and performing a hand-grip strength test

EMERGE Australia article about the study here:
https://www.emerge.org.au/blog/chromic
 
erm.....understanding your austin rover mini and looking for possible clutch repair options, in the children's bakery section of the library?

How can they possibly come up with treatments, rather than just trying things at random, without at least a basic understanding of what they are attempting to treat?
 
https://impact.deakin.edu.au/2021/0...c-encephalomyelitis-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/

2021 is an exciting time for ME/CFS science in Australia. Money is flowing. That means in time, research results will also flow. Australian labs are gearing up to do the work to deliver insights into the cause of ME/CFS and, most importantly, possible treatments.

Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) last year allocated $3.3 million for ME/CFS research. That money was split three ways, and a third of it went to a man named Ken Walder, Co-Director and Theme Leader of the Novel Treatment Discovery team at IMPACT.

Professor Walder lives in the charming seaside town of Ocean Grove in Victoria with his family and two dogs, Daisy and Jack. To find him however, you’d be best looking in the lab. Walder is the Chair of Metabolic Diseases at Deakin University, and he is most often hard at work on the Waurn Ponds campus, a sprawling collection of buildings plonked down next to cow paddocks a 30-minute drive from his home.

It’s not the most obvious place to conduct cutting-edge research, but Walder likes it.

“Compared to some of the other places I’ve been what I like about Deakin is it is a very collaborative and collegiate place,” he says.

He has enough experience to know a healthy research environment when he sees one. Walder, who is named as inventor on 40 patents and author on over 150 academic papers, has had an extremely productive career that has taken him to the prestigious US National Institutes of Health before returning to Deakin University.
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One strength of Walder’s work is it will test the most energy-hungry cells.

“In the past in ME/CFS research, which has been really underfunded for a long period of time, people do what they can. People have taken white blood cells,” he says. “The problem with that is white blood cells are not a highly energetic cell. They spend most of their time just cruising around in a fairly relaxed phase.”

Professor Walder prefers to focus on cells that use most energy: skeletal muscle and brain. These are obtained not directly (you can’t obtain patients’ brain cells safely!) but by the use of stem cells.

Here’s how it works: take white blood cells, turn them into stem cells, and then turn those stem cells into either cortical networks (Walder: “We call it brain in a dish”) or skeletal muscle cells (“You look down a microscope and see the fibres contracting”).

Then they stress the cells to see how they react.

“While there may not be an obvious difference at baseline, when you stress the cells you might see that they are unable to respond appropriately.”

This process of transformation, of course, comes with some risk that the key factors are lost, Walder admits. “If there’s 20 abnormalities present and you take the cells through this process, you could lose half of them,” he says.
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So, one of the three studies funded by the NHMRC. I believe that, while there has been criticism of Paul Fisher's work with the leukocytes turned into leukoblasts in the grounds that the process of transformation causes a lot that was specific to the cells to be lost, the idea of working with stem cells is more widely accepted by scientists in this field.
 
Re the commercialation aspect:
Still, the process has shown results in the past. “I can tell you we did this in diabetes and it worked, and we sold the intellectual property for that to a US biotech company that is still developing the technology … This work is NHMRC-funded so we are not specifically looking to commercialise anything; we are looking to find something that will help participants with the disease.”
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For ME/CFS patients the most exciting aspect of Walder’s work is that it culminates in drug testing. After Walder and his team learn how to stress and dysregulate ME/CFS cells, the grant will fund the use of 1300 well-known, off-patent drugs to see which is best at restoring the cells to looking like healthy control cells.
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The project is a lot like the work of Paul Fisher's team, except that it is using muscle and brain cells derived from stem cells, rather than leukoblasts derived from leukocytes. My understanding is that independent people working in the field think this approach has a greater chance of success and Walder has shown his team is capable of the work. There's still the problem of potentially losing what is unique about the ME/CFS cells when they are in the body of a person with ME/CFS, in the process of the cell transformation in vitro.
 
Hutan said:
There's still the problem of potentially losing what is unique about the ME/CFS cells when they are in the body of a person with ME/CFS, in the process of the cell transformation in vitro.
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Too right. It sounds barmy to me. If you make stem cells and then differentiate them you are likely to unwind all acquired and epigenetic processes leaving you with cell behaviour just based on the genome. Since people do not have ME at birth that seems unhelpful.

Hutan said:
My understanding is that independent people working in the field think this approach has a greater chance of success and Walder has shown his team is capable of the work.
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Independent people working in fields like this often haven't a clue I am afraid. And grant giving committees tend to work on the basis of not offending high profile hi-tech investigators.

Moreover, the idea of restoring function in vitro with drugs seems to me pie in the sky. No immunomodulatory drug I know of would do that - their job is to interfere with one cell in order to rebalance a problem of interaction of many cells. And as for restoring function in brain cells - nobody knows what individual brain cells do much.
 
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