Video: Treating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - Ankush Dehlia, PhD student, 2025

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Treating chronic fatigue syndrome. Meet PhD candidate Ankush Dehlia.
Ankush Dehlia is a PhD candidate at Deakin’s School of Life and Environmental Sciences. Ankush’s research is on repurposing drugs for the treatment of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) - a severe, chronic, and debilitating illness that affects around one per cent of the Australian population. The causes of ME/CFS are unknown, and there is no cure. Ankush’s work may pave the way for new and better treatment options for ME/CFS sufferers in the future.
 
Hutan said:
It would be great if Ankush could join us here. It would be good to know what his underlying hypotheses are, how he goes about choosing drugs to be evaluated, and how he plans to evaluate them.
Click to expand...

If this is the TCR-funded Deakin work I would guess that the workflow is phenotype cells (as far as we know, RNA seq) -> blast them with an array of accessible drugs -> see what worked best in "reversing" the phenotype. It seems like a discovery approach

How the final step is determined is important - given the number of drugs (1300 from memory?) and that it's using omics data, one would assume it would be a systematic approach with an established pipeline which should reduce the risk of bias. It will be interesting to consider the detailed clinical implications of the drugs/pathways of interest that come up.
 
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Ankush Dehlia has a review paper published with Mark Guthridge (thread, abstract below). Guthridge is not actually the researcher to whom the TCR funding went. (That's Ken Walder, who is at a different Deakin campus). Perhaps Dehlia is working with Walder but they simply didn't co-author the paper together?

There's also a second or third(!) part of Deakin looking at mecfs, which is running an opportunistic clinical trial on trimetazadine after they found it doing some interesting metabolic stuff in bipolar.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39353473/
The persistence of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) after SARS-CoV-2 infection: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Ankush Dehlia 1 , Mark A Guthridge 2
Affiliations
Affiliations
  • 1 School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia.
  • 2 School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia. Electronic address: m.guthridge@deakin.edu.au.
Free article
Abstract
Objectives: Long COVID-19 (LC) patients experience a number of chronic idiopathic symptoms that are highly similar to those of post-viral myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). We have therefore performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to determine the proportion of LC patients that satisfy ME/CFS diagnostic criteria.

Methods: Clinical studies published between January 2020 and May 2023 were identified using the PubMed, Web of Science, Embase and CINAHL databases. Publication inclusion/exclusion criteria were formulated using the global CoCoPop framework. Data were pooled using a random-effects model with a restricted maximum-likelihood estimator. Study quality was assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute critical assessment tool.

Results: We identified 13 eligible studies that reported a total of 1973 LC patients. Our meta-analysis indicated that 51% (95% CI, 42%-60%) of LC patients satisfied ME/CFS diagnostic criteria, with fatigue, sleep disruption, and muscle/joint pain being the most common symptoms. Importantly, LC patients also experienced the ME/CFS hallmark symptom, post-exertional malaise.

Conclusions: Our study not only demonstrates that LC patients exhibit similar symptom clusters to ME/CFS, but that approximately half of LC patients satisfy a diagnosis of ME/CFS. Our findings suggest that current ME/CFS criteria could be adapted to the identification of a subset of LC patients that may facilitate the standardised diagnosis, management and the recruitment for clinical studies in the future.

Keywords: Chronic fatigue syndrome; Diagnosis; Long-COVID; Long-haul COVID-19; Meta-analysis; Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome; Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19; Post-exertional malaise; Post-viral syndrome; Prevalence.
 
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