Casterofspells
Established Member (Voting Rights)
I haven’t heard of any international project funding as of yet. Could you be mixing that up with the EU funds maybe? Though I’d love to see that as well.
EU Horizon funding - Prof. Simon Carding, €7.5 million
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I haven’t heard of any international project funding as of yet. Could you be mixing that up with the EU funds maybe? Though I’d love to see that as well.
V.R.T.
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Not mixing it up with EU funding. I have only found a couple of exchanges where we discussed the possibility but it doesn't seem to have been concluded one way or the other, apart from one person quoting the national decade people as saying international collaboration was vital. I can't insert quotes now cos forum is playing up for me.
I'd love some clarity on this. If they can fund it we should all be lobbying them to do so.
I'd love some clarity on this. If they can fund it we should all be lobbying them to do so.
V.R.T.
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Above are the two exchanges I found earlier. Neither were conclusive
If anyone knows whether UK labs are eligible for German Nationa Decade funding please help clarify the situation!
I actually believe it is quite a bit more important to have other teams from other countries invested in the genetic angle on ME/CFS and I have little doubt that if statisticians and genetists in Germany would be able to collaborate with smart clinicans to come up with a reasonable cohort you could go quite far. I think the problem will be the latter, but it shouldn't be that hard as others have already shown how things can be done. My impression is that an independent replication study along the lines of DecodeME including a clinical cohort in Germany would move the field further along than SequenceME.
V.R.T.
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
But surely that would clarify none of the uncertainty about what genes the SNPs point towards and miss all of the same stuff that all GWAS miss, the stuff that WGS picks up.
Not that it wouldn't be important.
My impression is that people will have a harder time not funding and doing further work, including WGS, and a greater interest in general, if there was an independent replication study including a clinical cohort and of course you have additional power as well, but I might be wrong.
Utsikt
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I might be too cynical, but waiting for a replication of a GWAS when you could do a WGS instead sounds like an excuse to do nothing.
A WGS would be the project to signal to the entire world that we’re taking ME/CFS seriously. It would be the best spent PR money ever, because it’s dirt cheap compared to the impact it will have.
I strongly doubt that. I don't think it would change much.
Germany is spending 500 million, much of that will go into biomedical research, millions into genetic research, without there being much of signal to the whole world either.
V.R.T.
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Ok but your initial comment talked about moving the field along which to me meant scientific progress. And SequenceME has much better chance of doing that than a replication study.
OrganicChilli
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Why would they be more interested in the same diffuse signals from a replication study instead of potential clear signals from WGS?
And who even is "people"? The MRC won't fund anything regardless.
Utsikt
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
And most of that will go into whatever memes the German researchers are chasing. A GWS is a neutral study, which aims to generate knowledge that anyone can benefit from.
The current approach feels like it’s done by people that want to be the ones that were right, instead of trying to figure out what’s actually going on by doing the basics first.
I think scientific progress will come from having more people with a genuine interest involved. Independent replication including a clinical cohort tends to do that. If you're directly just talking about the progress of the study directly then I'm not sure that either of the approaches lead directly to more scientifc progress than the other as I'm not an geneticist and don't understand enough about the subject matter but I think the one will be more helpful with scientific validity and the other with deeper understanding. I think both aspects will be important. From what I understand it has been historically fairly standard to run an independent replication and most criticism in the media seems to have come from there not being a clinical cohort, so that seemingly would be very useful. We anyways will need both, I'm pretty sure.
If Germany is willing to fund a GWAS and you have sensible people involved, you will automatically get WGS at some point as well it would seem to me. Is that not the normal way of things?
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Sure, but I don't think funding a WGS would change anything about that and of course the same can be said about Germany funding a GWAS, with he both have limited enthusiasm for knowing the state of research.
Because they would have much more certainty in the signals being genuinely related to the illness rather than perhaps to other artefacts, especially if artefacts related to self-recruitment can't be ruled out and there is a lack of indication what the signal is driven by (for example is PEM even of any relevance at all?). I'm not claiming that it would change that much but I think people are vastly overestimating the impact a WGS will have, even if funding SequenceME is a no brainer and one of the most meaningful avenues right now.
I think what matters most is having a handful of sensible people in Germany involved. If 100 million get wasted BPS junk that is fairly irrelevant as long as you have a handful of smart minds doing the right stuff. I fear much more that you will get the same type of nonsense RECOVER produced.
V.R.T.
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I think this is deeply and uncessarily cynical.
Utsikt
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I don’t follow.
I’m not arguing that funding a WGS would change everything else they are going to spend money on, but it would indicate that they are willing to do the basic work, and treat ME/CFS like every other major disease that had their WGSs ages ago.
It would be just 5 % of their budget, so it wouldn’t really come at the cost of other work. They could still chase their pet theories.
It feels like a Kodak situation - they have everything they need to be at the forefront, but refuse to use it.
Perhaps you are right and I hope to be proven wrong, but I find it very hard to believe that funding SequenceME would be a signal to the world that ME/CFS would be taken seriously.
V.R.T.
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Oh we've gotten wires crossed. I meant that SequenceME had a good chance of changing MECFS research, not it being funded.
Yes, but that is exactly what they are doing, is it not? They are funding a GWAS. We fear that it might not deliver much, because there is no indication on how the population will look like but in principle they are pretending to do the basics. The signal to the whole world is not any different per se, it's a similar message.
I think the situation with Kodak was quite a bit different. In retrospect everyone is smarter but in reality nobody back then would have even imagined that Kodak could vanish into obscurity or how things would develop. I think funding genetic work into ME/CFS is much more obvious.
How does everybody here seem to know that SequenceME applied for this funding?
I think on the internet things often come across as unnecessarily confrontational. I obviously also believe that SequenceME is a big chance and I hope it gets funded sooner than later. If it were up to me I'd be happy to give them 10 times the amount of funding they need from the pot of 500 million.
V.R.T.
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
We don't! We were speculating about whether they could.
If anyone knows the answer to that, it would be great to know!