Research news from Bhupesh Prusty

Moved from a research paper thread

Reactivated Latent Viruses in Long Covid and ME/CFS | With Dr Bhupesh Prusty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dI7uaTni5g

 

Reference to PG and friends at 6:31 —

 

There are now 3 videos up at this site, which are a presentation by Dr. Prusty just split into 3 parts. I found watching the videos to be much more informative than trying to troll through that paper. in the third video he says that he thinks the next steps are to go to mouse models because it’s easier to study natural IGM processes in mice. He clearly separates out the differences in the results between patient populations. I’m certainly not qualified to make any comments on the science viability, but I did find him to be serious, well informed and not self promoting.

I would love to hear other comments on the videos.

 

Perhaps i am wrong about this specific research. But every other animal model of CFS i ever saw was utterly stupid.... believing you can give ME/CFS to animals by exhausting them. As if CFS were exhaustion! So i certainly hope he's not going to fall into that trap.

Surely not.... but nothing would surprise me these days!

 

next they will be subjecting the poor animals to childhood abuse/trauma, then making sure they are 'over achievers' by observing how industrious they are on the wheel, or paper shredding, and giving them some kind of virus just incase.

 

oh, very good Nellie, vey good

 

I understand and appreciate your humor, and I initially had the same reaction when I watched the video, but in this case I think these reactions are misplaced.

At about six minutes into the third and final video, Dr Prusty explains that the reason he would go to a mouse model is that the process of creating natural IGM in humans is not understood very well at all (“a black box“) and is much better characterized and understood in mouse models. thus he would go to most models to study the process of the creation of natural IGM (and its relationship to his findings?). I did not get the implication that he was creating a “fatigue” model, rather was going to it for a specific "natural IgM" related purpose. He was was speculating in response to a posed question at this point. Perhaps I understood it incorrectly, you can watch it yourself.

having said that, I personally always remember the bromide, “ mice lie and monkeys exaggerate”.

 

Yes but it is also significantly different in mice. They have a different range of immunoglobulin classes. Human natural antibodies are actually pretty well characterised in certain respects. That includes a specific VH4 gene called VH4.34 that mice would not have.

I am afraid that the whole idea of using animal models for immune disease (rather than normal immune mechanisms) has been pretty much a waste of time for fifty years now. You can prove that a harebrained idea of how something might cause disease in a mouse does cause disease in a mouse. But you can do it for 100 different harebrained ideas. 99 of those must be wrong for any particular human disease (if one is right) and that makes it a pretty reasonable bet that all 100 are wrong. The suffering caused to animals have been vast.

 

@Jonathan Edwards, thanks. that is the kind of response I was hoping to enlicit.

I do wish more people would watch the videos and comment. In the final video Dr. Prusty gets asked “what next.“ that is about five minutes and 30 seconds in and for the next four minutes or so he does his speculation on what he would like to do in the future.

 

Wasn't necessarily expecting that (he announced something in that direction on Twitter a while ago, but I can't imagine exchanging Germany for Latvia will lead to an increase in ME/CFS research budget). I wonder whether his long-term and rather sizeable grant for ME/CFS research will just carry over to Latvia.

 

Slides now available for presentations at CDC December 18 #MEcfs event

-“Understanding Infectious Origin of ME/CFS through the Recent Pandemic” Dr. Bhupesh K. Prusty

-“Endogenous Retroviruses and ME/CFS" Dr. Dawei Li

https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/pdfs/22-sec-slides-prusty-508.pdf

 

Lab website is online now.

https://www.prustylab.org/