Updates from the UK ME/CFS Biobank / CureME team

Professor Duncan Baird is a geneticist with an interest in telomere biology and genome stability, based at Cardiff University. ...
This project hopes to provide an in-depth understanding of cellular ageing of immune cells in patients with ME/CFS and whether this may impact on the pathology of this condition.
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It will be good to have some replication of the 2018 study on this topic that was done by Unger and others.
 
-- Come and work for us! --

We're looking for an Assistant Project Coordinator to join the CureME team. You would be contributing across our research portfolio, learning about finance, data and project management. You would be working in a friendly and relaxed environment with generous leave and pension, while developing a wide skill set applicable across the public sector.

Literacy/numeracy are essential, but no specific working experience is required:

https://jobs.lshtm.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=ITD-CRD-2019-11
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https://www.facebook.com/mecfsbiobank/posts/2290448331002597


 
Delighted to announce that Kate has had an abstract accepted for the American Public Health Association Conference 2019, one of the biggest public health meetings in the world.

#MECFS was first on their agenda two years ago, with Luis presenting. We're particularly glad that Kate has been accepted for an oral presentation.

The title is: "Methods of Named-Entity Recognition and Machine Learning to transform and analyse unstructured free-text information on current medication use among participants from the UK ME/CFS Biobank: A case study."
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Code: 
https://www.facebook.com/mecfsbiobank/posts/2348822885165141



 
Andy said:
Code: 
https://www.facebook.com/mecfsbiobank/posts/2348822885165141



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I am honoured and delighted to be a part of this effort.

The CureME team during my presentation saw an opportunity in using text data they had from patient questionnaires. So after my presentation we started working on applying Named Entity Recognition (NER) to transform the text data to structured data.

This transformation enabled us to enrich the patient data with supplement and medications information and analyse this data to see associations with symptoms and many more interesting insights. We now have the mechanism to do the same data transformation to hundreds of thousands of patient records within a few minutes !
 
mariovitali said:
I am honoured and delighted to be a part of this effort.

The CureME team during my presentation saw an opportunity in using text data they had from patient questionnaires. So after my presentation we started working on applying Named Entity Recognition (NER) to transform the text data to structured data.

This transformation enabled us to enrich the patient data with supplement and medications information and analyse this data to see associations with symptoms and many more interesting insights. We now have the mechanism to do the same data transformation to hundreds of thousands of patient records within a few minutes !
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Brilliant - thank you @mariovitali
 
I just got back from Philadelphia and wanted to share my experience in presenting our joint effort with the CureME team. We were the first to begin the sessions on Big data and Machine Learning applied to Healthcare with Kathleen Mudie from the CureME team giving a great presentation to around 60 people. At the end i joined Kathleen to answer the technical questions on the methodology we used.

Someone from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) / National Center for Health Statistics approached us after the presentation and congratulated us for presenting a "trully groundbreaking" work, saying that these technologies will transform Healthcare in several ways. Usually there is a clash between Data Miners / Data Scientists vs Statisticians because -in all fairness- most techniques used have their core to statistics but him -being a statistician- was very open regarding these techniques.

I also had the chance to explain to him more about my work and my attempt to research ME/CFS and was waiting for his comments almost in agony because he was very keen in identifying problems in the methodologies that others presented. Again, he said that this is groundbreaking work that should be published. His very positive reactions really gave me the strength to keep trying until finally someone accepts to apply these technologies to research ME/CFS more extensively.

I want to Thank Kate Mudie and all of the CureME team for giving me this opportunity.

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Kate presented CureME's plans for research into the impact of COVID-19 and #MECFS at the virtual internal seminar hosted by the Centre for Global Chronic Conditions based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine today.

Well done Kate and we are excited to keep you updated with our future research plans - here's a sneak peak of her presentation!

#pwme
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https://www.facebook.com/mecfsbiobank/posts/3110878808959541


 
It is a strange time to be writing about the work of the UK ME/CFS Biobank (UKMEB); as I write, our office has been closed for over two months and clinical visits have been paused indefinitely; samples cannot currently be distributed. COVID-19 has created many challenges to our work and the research of many others, but it may also make the work of the Biobank more important than ever and provide various opportunities for future studies and discoveries. At this time, we would like to draw your attention to the rich dataset we have available to researchers worldwide, that may inspire new research applications during this period when existing lab work may be paused.
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https://www.meaction.net/2020/06/03/the-uk-me-cfs-biobank-a-rich-resource-of-samples-and-data/
 
With increasing reports of ‘Long COVID-19’ or ‘long-haulers’, we are looking into future research possibilities in this area.

Some people that have COVID-19 may go on to develop ME/CFS and following up these people may uncover clues on how the disease progresses.

This is preliminary information about a potentially important Covid-19 research collaboration between infectious diseases expert Dr William Weir and the ME Biobank – whose basic running costs are met by the ME Association Ramsay Research Fund.
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https://meassociation.org.uk/2020/0...into-long-covid-and-me-cfs-at-the-me-biobank/

Originally posted here, Possibility of ME or PVFS after COVID-19
 
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