USA: InCellDx Dr Patterson - New lab service offering cytokine tests to Covid longhaulers

Hmm, is he still promoting the same unevidenced treatments?

 

Hmmm… maybe not so good….

 

Yes, kind of a strange pick. Given the correct framing I don’t think there is anything wrong with letting the guy speak, the problem is that he seems to be convinced that he is on the right track, even so far as to pick Twitter fights with other researchers who he disagrees with.

 

Problem is also that maraviroc doesn’t work for MECFS. A “bunch” of people have tried it with no effect.

 

I didn't have the bandwidth to watch the video but Cort Johnson has summarized it in a post if anyone's interested:

Getting at the Heart of Post-Infectious Illnesses? Bruce Patterson Talks on Long COVID and ME/CFS/FM

"On December 6th, InCellDx announced it hired a chief operating officer as it prepared to expand into “new markets globally including the UK and EU”, and scaled its “immunology/long COVID treatment program, and advance(d) it’s biopharmaceutical development.”

Confident in his ability to treat ME/CFS/FM and post-Lyme disease, Patterson said those trials are coming as well. 2022, he said, will be focused on treating long COVID, ME/CFS/FM, post-coronavirus vaccine illness, and post-Lyme disease."​

 

I am very interested in speaking with any of these 500 “post Lyme” patients that he has treated, but try as I might, I have not been able to find any of them online…

If anyone knows anyone, please put me in touch I guess.

I did the cytokine testing and my results were not that striking. I have high CCL4, that’s about it.

 

Hmm, the "Twitter fights" you noted in comment 23 have been complemented with podcast "attack ads" as referenced here. Not helpful. Would be better to combine knowledge and insights, but this seems to be a strongly commercially positioned development path.

Dr Patterson's protocol may well be working in LC (perhaps CCR5 receptor antagonism might be affecting megakaryocyte function [1]). Jaybee's comment indicates that even if it were, the LC mechanism doesn't translate to ME in meaningful numbers.

His proposal of immortal monocytes surely faces a high bar of acceptance, though. I've offered my take on the alternative to that theory in this thread.

 

Dr Paterson has people on alot of medication not available to other countries and unlikely to be for some time in a public service due to lack of evidence and cost.

Interestingly, private clinics in Germany seem to offer other types of apheresis for ME/CFS eg. extracorporeal apheresis to remove auto-antibodies for adrenergic receptors. All seem to want larger studies to improve the evidence base and funding. Many universities rely on patronage/govt funding etc and I suppose we will have to wait for them to publish. Criticising other researchers work seems unprofessional but I have my doubts they will join forces.

 

maraviroc is used as an HIV drug. In order to ensure its efficacy they run a tropism test. It may be that in some people the CCR5 mechanism may not work and a CXCR4 mechanism may come into play.

https://www.catie.ca/maraviroc-celsentri

pravastatin sometimes seems to be implicated fatigue and long term usage leading to insulin related issues, but there is a study that talks about effects on endothelial cells.

"We therefore demonstrated pravastatin rescued endothelial progenitor cells from dexamethasone-induced autophagy dysfunction through the AMPK-mTOR signaling pathway in a liver kinase B1-dependent manner."

https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2018.00307

 

No comment

https://twitter.com/user/status/1462097454007042050

 

Check the creation date of that Twitter account and the number of followers.

I wish I wasn’t so suspicious…

anyway, I actually have an appt w Patterson soon, I plan to pick his brain about the whole post Lyme thing since that is of particular interest to me.

 

What is Patterson going to do to you? Give you maraviroc? Let us know how it goes.......

 

I have no idea. I’m not very interested in maraviroc unless someone shows me some sort of better evidence that it works.

I have done the cytokine tests though, and by biggest question is whether or not he has found a pattern in their “post Lyme” group, and whether or not I fit that pattern.

I don’t even believe that he and his group are treating patients — they are simply consulting on the test results. It’s just a way for me to have a conversation with someone who claims to be studying the disease entity that I most likely fit into.

 

Not a lot to report on from a scientific side of things. He seems very confident in his approach but I suppose we already knew that.

He talked about some anecdotes of patients who got much better, very quickly.
He talked about some upcoming publications.

he talked about an “upcoming clinical trial” that doesn’t really sound like a real thing (it sounds like there is just some patient who wants to privately fund it).

With specific regard to post lyme, it sounds like his theory (simplifying to fit my understanding) is that there is some sort of bacterial antigen or debris that is triggering the same endothelial / CCR5 pathway that is triggered by the spike protein in long COVID. (He mentioned peptidogylcans which I know have been mentioned before as a potential component of post Lyme.)

I’m still a little unclear how his medical group works. He said that they will send me a bunch of information that I can discuss with my doctor, which seemed like as good a place as any to leave it — no commitment from me necessary.

 

I've not followed this, but there are further shenanigans involving IncellDx / Patterson, regarding some sort of blood draw clinic in the UK for long-covid and/or vaccine-injured people. It looks like each party is blaming each other.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1501562070009106434

 

I am thinking of inventing an organisation called nonaQ. This is for people who didn't think anything shifty was going on but discovered that there was - sort of stsiroeht ycaripsnoc.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1502471942951026692

 

I've not seen anything about this IncellDx until yesterday when I started watching a YouTube video of an Integrative Healthcare Conference with David Brady, Dr. Bruce Patterson, Dr. Richard Horowitz, Dr. Tom Fabian and Gez Medinger shared by @Anna H in the thread "Long Covid in the media and social media 2022" here. Only watched a little bit of it, but there were too much certainty and too many red flags.

In the same thread here, @cfsandmore shared an NBCNEWS article which I assume is the same news story as the tweet @Jaybee00 shared just above.


Good to see some critical journalism on this. Here are some quotes:

Anaya turned to IncellDx, where she was able to get a telemedicine appointment with the company's founder, Dr. Bruce Patterson, "almost immediately." All patients are seen virtually.

Patterson is a virologist who was heavily involved in HIV research for decades before shifting his focus to long Covid in 2020.

The main premise of IncellDx is a diagnostic blood test which the company claims can diagnose long Covid, help determine effective therapies and show any improvements after treatment. IncellDx does not do blood draws; instead, patients must send a blood sample to the company for analysis.

The test looks at levels of 14 immune system proteins called cytokines that the company says indicate the blood vessel inflammation specific to long Covid.

Those 14 markers were identified using mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence, Patterson said. They're able to show, he said, "what's different about these long Covid patients?"

....

More than 18,000 people have taken IncellDx's test, Patterson said. Nearly all — 95 percent — have been diagnosed with long Covid based on it.

That's a red flag, said Dr. Marc Sala, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist who sees long Covid patients at Northwestern Medicine's Comprehensive Covid-19 Center. A test can only be validated, he said, through using it on a diverse group of people — in other words, a large mix of people both with and without long Covid.

....

IncellDx's tests showed that she had elevated levels of biomarkers that indicated long Covid. She started with the company's regimen, along with several other treatments.

Several months later, a repeat IncellDx blood test suggested she'd largely recovered. But McCloskey still suffered from fevers, extreme fatigue and memory lapses.

[Patterson] told me that I was his poster child for recovery. And I'm like, you know, I'm still really sick.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/long-covid-patients-private-company-help-rcna9035

 

I had to educate myself quite early on on Patterson (and also the people pushing ivermectin) because they had a large social media presence and were quite popular among covid long haulers since almost the beginning, at least in the groups I joined here in Hungary. To the average long hauler they seemed to be the experts on the subject, doctors, researchers with videos and good news on (unpublished) research released regularly etc. They were very good at marketing themselves through social media, so reached a lot of people. They seem to be a bit less popular now to me.

But I remember they've been fishy from the beginning and I kept asking myself "who the hell are these?" when they showed up as self-styled long covid experts so quickly.

 

It's linked on Dr. Bruce Patterson's bio on Twitter.

I watched that NBC news coverage on tv the other evening.