Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a serious disease affecting multiple systems, e.g., the immune system, the metabolic system, and the central nervous system. It’s the dysfunctions or dysregulations across all these systems. Our ME/CFS study, as part of the Harvard ME/CFS Collaboration and in collaboration with Stanford End ME/CFS Project, has been supported by Open Medicine Foundation. 

Our collaborative ME/CFS Data Center at Stanford (http://endmecfs.stanford.edu) is funded by the Open Medicine Foundation for top researchers and experts to work together to decipher the mystery of ME/CFS. The aim of the Data Center is to provide a collaborative platform for managing, integrating, and sharing the available datasets, including genetics, molecular analytes, physiological measurements, and clinical information. 

We select a few patients who had severe illness and compare them with the normal controls. The idea is to carefully look over all the currently available measurements, from genes to proteins to metabolites and to the corresponding functions, as well as the gut microbiome, the functions of their organs and tissues, the environmental exposure, and surely the clinical records. We aim to identify a core set of features that can therefore be followed up in a bigger study. If these findings or subsets of these findings could be verified, they may lead to new discoveries and eventually better treatments.

In terms of analyses we conducted, there are three principle parts that have been intently considered. The first one is to compare patients with controls to see whether there is a consistent difference. And, we can also compare results of different measurements on the same patient to see whether a specific difference could explain the abnormalities in certain analytes or even clinical symptoms in that particular person. And the third part, we integrate all these data together and try to identify a few features that might be able to best explain what patients perceive as ME/CFS symptoms. If those features could be verified in a larger study, those features can be used as either biomarkers for ME/CFS diagnosis or potential drug targets for therapeutic development. We hope that in the near future we can better understand the big picture of this disease, and perhaps offer a potential cure of this disease.

 

Li-Yuan Hung is in charge of this project, in collaboration with Dr. Chia-Jung Chang, Dr. Feifei Han, and Dr. Peng Li.