Eran Segal: Antibody reactivities against autoantigens & the microbiome in ME/CFS (grant)

[Sasha]

Worth having individual threads for the five teams receiving Solve's Ramsay Awards, I think - Eran Segal is new to ME/CFS (I think) and very interesting (see this other thread).

Details of his project here:

http://solvecfs.org/2017-ramsay-award-program-team-5/

which concludes (broken up for ease of reading):

Here, we propose a novel and broad approach to comprehensively study the role of antibodies against (1) autoantigens and (2) the microbiota in ME/CFS patients (compared to healthy controls).

We believe that a combination of directed evolution approaches with next generation sequencing technology can serve as a powerful tool to test complex ME/CFS samples in a few simple steps.

Especially, as only small amounts of patients’ blood samples are required, which can be collected in a simple and non-invasive way.

In addition to gaining insights on disease mechanism(s) in ME/CFS, the identified (auto-) antigens may as well be used as potent markers for reliable diagnosis of ME/CFS.