Dr. Avi Nath: Thank you Dr. Koroshetz. So I'm going to tell you three things. One is I'll tell you where we stand currently with the ME/CFS study that we were doing. Second thing I want to tell you is what we've been doing with COVID and the third thing I'm going to tell you is the overlap between COVID and ME/CFS and what we're doing about that.
So first of all with the current ME/CFS intramural study that we were conducting, it came to a grinding halt when the COVID outbreak occurred but we took that opportunity to look at the data that we have collected on these patients. And we have a huge amount of data and so what we did was, we formed working groups, several different working groups, one for immunology, one for the virology, one for the physiology that we've done, and so on and so forth. All those people have started looking at the data, analyzing it and when you analyze data it leads sometimes to more questions than answers, which is the way science works, but I think that's perfectly fine. So now we're doing some follow-up experiments to answer those things, trying to make correlations between each of these working groups. So anyhow that's where we stand with that. I think we have some really interesting findings that are coming out of this stuff and so our hope is to get this out as soon as we can.
The second thing is when COVID hit, I mean my area of expertise is infections of the nervous system, so as you can imagine we got very heavily involved and with Dr. Koroshetz' help we were able to send messages around to all over the country to collect brain samples from patients who were dying of COVID and we were fortunate to be able to get some samples because these autopsies had to be done in BSL3 labs. We didn't have a BSL3 functioning lab here in the intramural NIH at that time that we could take our brains from and there were very few that were available around the country and even some places who had it they didn't have PPE to actually do these things. So multiple challenges but we overcame all of them.
And what we did was we accessed the brains and we studied the pathology. We found that actually there is a fair bit of inflammation in the brain, there was damage to the blood vessels in the brain, and these were very unique individuals because they were individuals we got from the New York medical examiner's office. Some of them had died in bed, or in a subway, and so they did not have much respiratory symptoms. They were not critically ill individuals but they still had pathology in their brain, so my suspicion is that had these individuals survived they would have had these long-haul COVID symptoms for sure. That gives us an opportunity to understand the brain pathology of long-haul COVID patients.
And I think that brings me to the relevance for ME/CFS because we suspect that there's overlap between the two syndromes and so what we learned from these patients is applicable to ME/CFS. What we've done now is, we are very eager to bring in patients with so-called long-haul COVID who look exactly like ME/CFS, they meet all the criteria for ME/CFS. We bring them to NIH, study them exactly the same way as we've done for the ME/CFS patients and try to see if we can determine what the similarities and differences might be. For that there's no intramural funding currently available, so we wrote a grant like everybody else and we've submitted it and if the grant gets funded we plan to bring in about 50 individuals with ME/CFS-like symptoms and another 50 who had COVID and got better completely, so we can compare the two. So that's where we stand. We're waiting to see if the funds arrive, we'll initiate the studies. So I'll stop over here.
https://www.nih.gov/mecfs/nih-me-cfs-advocacy-call-march-30-2021
