Dr Karl Morten - UK researcher based at Oxford University

Video: Prof Karl Morten (2022) Mitochondrial dysfunction: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and long COVID

 

From Twitter.

"Urgent, please forward Our new Raman diagnostics paper is ready to submit. It has taken 12 months but now includes 98 subjects and we can assign unknown samples to disease and control groups with 90% accuracy. The study builds on our previous paper"

"Our key researcher is out of contact in 3 days time! Our plan is to apply for a 5 year fellowship too continue the work and expand into other areas including #lyme @pans #MS #pwME #LongCovid"

"The Fellowship if funded will start towards the end of 2023 and we have a 12 months funding gap. We need £5000 per month to pay the researchers salary. A £10 donation per month from 500 people would cover this. Donations can be set up on the link below. development.ox.ac.uk/mecfs"

"It is crucial we keep this work going as we look to move the approach into studying single cell immune function in live cells in vitro. Please use the Marker Validation link on the donations page."

"I feel 2023 will be a big year for many complex and currently unexplained conditions. We need to start joining up the research findings and this will require long term funding #pwME # lyme #LongCovid"

 

Does anyone know why they don’t get funding from Solve or OMF? I don’t feel capable of assessing the science and understanding if worth donating to. At least with Solve and OMF I know a team has reviewed before allocating funds (even though sometimes I find decisions questionable)

This post is pretty confusing. 5000 per month for 12 months is £60,000. Is that what they must raise?

 

Or ME Research UK. They would need £60,000 per annum to cover all costs

 

It seems that they want to raise £300,000 for a five year salary. To be productive that will need running costs so the realistic need is about £500,000.

I don't think that can be raised through monthly donations, and certainly it needs peer review.

 

Andrew Green tweet says abstract says accuracy is 98% not 90% as in tweet above. Quite a difference.
Can anyone clarify?

 

98% is from the published paper, 90% is from the unpublished paper.

 

2.5 years on and my views haven't changed.

 

Do we know which is the accurate figure? The Morten group tweet above is using 90%. Why would the figures be different?

 

The most likely thing is that with larger case numbers the original figure derived by machine learning on a test sample, has not replicated precisely - going from 98% to 90%.

Figures like this need to be taken in context. If just 10% of healthy people come up 'positive' and ME has a prevalence of 1 in 500 (say) then there will be 50 false positives for every real one. That need not be a problem but it emphasises how complicated assessing tests is.

 

I help run a ME/CFS research fund. A lot of people with standing orders are healthy partners, siblings and parents of patients. These people’s ability to work has been affected little if at all (though the household budget would of course often have been affected in the case of partners).

I can understand that most people with the illness can not set up large regular donations. But large numbers give nothing to research and many who do donate don’t give via regular giving.

My impression is there can be a chain reaction of sorts: get the patient interested in raising money privately for research and often family and friends may fundraise and/or donate.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1608492111816708096

 

That makes more sense. I could not follow the original tweet.
It is still a lot of money to try to raise on a monthly subscription from 500 people.
It would be good to see the data already acquired.

 

One possible issue is this sort of level of funding is larger than the sorts of grants the UK ME Association (with its commitment to the biobank), ME Research UK, Solve ME/CFS Initiative and Action for ME generally give out. Probably the only private research funds that give out that sort of money are the Mason Foundation and the Open Medicine Foundation; the former I think only funds research in Australia it seems and OMF concentrates on their existing centres. Invest in ME concentrate on their research hub in Norwich.

I think the sort of sums being sought would be difficult to raise currently using crowdfunding.

 

One important question is: if true, would it even matter? As in, is this something that other medical professionals will look at and find relevant? Even if true?

Because we've already been through a cycle of duplication with LC and still zero interest for it. Still nothing but small entry-level studies. Still not being leverage to reduce costs or speed things up. Koroshetz made a comment about trials in the RECOVER initiative and indicated that they haven't figured out how to do clinical trials for less than $60M a pop, to answer a single question, which is absurdly wasteful and inefficient.

I'm pretty sure that the main parts of the puzzle have been individually figured out for a long time, it's just that no one is putting it together. So if this is another relevant piece of the puzzle that simply gets tossed off the table in the end...

There basically isn't any more money now than before LC, most of the research out there is such pure trash it doesn't even count. I don't think this will be figured by funding individuals teams, this effort needs to be coordinated, to build on itself. It's almost like academia is built to fail at problems like this, the current model couldn't fail any harder.

 

I have mentioned before that I am a bit sceptical about the value of measuring metabolism in PBMC. Most PBMC are lymphocytes like the one above. (A few are monocytes, which have much more cytoplasm and that makes things tricky if the proportions change for trivial reasons.)

As indicated the blood lymphocyte is essentially a cell doing nothing - in fact a nucleus (purple) with just enough cytoplasm (greyish) to keep it ticking over until it finds a lymph node to do something in.