Visit at the CureME Team, London - UK

Dear all,

I wanted to post an update regarding my second 3 day-visit at the CureME team at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in London, UK.

During my presentation in September the team saw some methods I've been working with that sparked their interest so we began collaborating for a paper. Since i cannot disclose much, all i can say is that we use certain techniques to enrich ME/CFS patient data and then use Machine Learning to analyse this information. Our goal of course is to be able to generate reproducible results to unseen cases.

I wanted to say that i am impressed with their attitude and open mind. As Ron Davis said, we have to think outside of the box for this syndrome. Dr Luis Nacul and Eliana Lacerda were very open to discussion, wanting to know everything about these analytical methods and trying to identify how could these methods help them to extract more knowledge.

Of course i took the opportunity to discuss about my "Liver Injury Hypothesis" and the presentation i gave last September. More specifically i discussed with them :

1) The importance of oxidative stress and whether this could be the reason that most ME/CFS patients do not get viral infections or if they do get one, it is on a mild form (the immune system uses oxidative stress to fight viruses)

2) The metabolites found by Dr Maureen Hanson that suggest impaired hepatic function / hepatotoxicity and whether these can be looked at for a larger number of ME/CFS patients. There may be more interesting updates coming up on this one.

3) The role of N-Linked Glycosylation and its relation to viral replication (we know that glycolysis is problematic in ME/CFS patients) .

A researcher with specialisation on Immunology was kind enough to listen about (1) and (3) -i think he appeared to be interested- and i will send him the relevant information next week. Of course, i would very much like to know -as a first step- whether these questions / remarks make sense medically-wise and how could these be evaluated / measured.

Needless to say that i am very excited. It has been an amazing experience so far but most of all i sincerely hope that something of true value will come out of this effort.

 

Thank you @mariovitali . I hope your perseverance pays off.

 

Good work @mariovitali

How does #3 about viral replication fit, if at all, with #1 about fewer viral infections?

 

Thank you @ScottTriGuy. Regarding #3 -to the best of my knowledge - certain viruses use Glycosylation to replicate :

https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/38/4/598/755888

So, since increased oxidative stress is found in ME/CFS patients and because of impaired Glycosylation then we can hypothesise that because of these two events, viruses simply do not find the right environment to replicate.

I came two this hypothesis since -when i had symptoms- i was not getting viral infections. However when i started taking N-Acetyl glucosamine (NAG) -a product which seems to be related to N-linked glycosylation- i started getting very easily infections. This has also happened to one more patient. I wonder if this was just a coincidence but i highly doubt it.

Because i know nothing about immunology, i would like to ask someone knowledgeable on the validity of all the above.

More about NAG and glycosylation here :

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fonc.2016.00054/full