What treatment trials for ME/CFS are currently ongoing?

Sasha

Sasha

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Again, in the light of... you know...?

I'm aware of Fluge & Mella's CycloME study:

  • CycloME part A – a phase II study investigating the effect of treatment with the chemotherapy drug cyclophosphamide in patients with moderate to severe ME/CFS.
  • CycloME part B – a phase II study investigating the effect of treatment with the chemotherapy drug cyclophosphamide in patients with severe to very severe ME/CFS.
CycloME is an unblinded study in which all patients receive the drug.

F&M said:
Status, CycloME part A
The treatment and follow-up phases were completed in August 2017.

Analyses of the overall results indicate that there is reason to pursue further testing of cyclophosphamide treatment in ME/CFS. We have therefore decided to move on with an amended protocol for part B of the study.

We expect to publish the results from part A of the CycloME trial during the first half of 2018.
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and

F&M said:
Part B

[...] we have now received approval from the Regional Ethics’ committee and the Norwegian Medicines Agency to conduct a pilot study involving three to five participants. If the pilot patients tolerate the treatment well, we may include a total of up to 20 participants.
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So not even RCTs there...

Any RCTs ongoing? Or non-RCT studies of anything likely?
 
Cornwall13 said:
Wonder if someone could help clarify things please.

Is the CycloME Part A trial being published any time soon?

Does the results from rituximab lower expectations for the results for cyclo?

Also, what is the theory behind cyclo working in ME?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Would you like to start a thread just to talk about the CycloME trial (which is very interesting now!)? :?

I'd like to keep this thread focused on listing what's ongoing, if possible.
 
ScottTriGuy said:
Perhaps @JaimeS may have some insight?
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So, Florida's group (Klimas et al) was doing genetics stuff last I checked, and they were gathering from 23andme. Not private info, they've been recruiting for this for awhile. So as far as I know, they are not testing drugs at this time.

McGregor and Armstrong were also looking at genes and metabolomics last I checked. Again, not private -- just more expedient for me to tell you than for you to go hunting. So probably not drugs just now.

VanElzakker is doing that neuroimaging study; so probably not drugs just now.

Fluge and Mella will probably pivot to a new drug and may try something else in relation to Ritux as well. I feel that they'll continue the search for a commonality between responders. I think they already tried that with APRIL and BAFF, but they didn't come up with anything there. There was a small uptick in BAFF in patients overall, but no correlation between that and response to Ritux.

Hanson doesn't seem to be doing drug trials either just now.

This speaks very little of what researchers may choose to do in the future, just what they're engaged in right now.

Weirdly, the research I'm closest to is the research I can't speak of. Hunt for Ron Davis quotes instead; Stanford is pretty picky about who represents their research to the public, which is understandable.
 
Treatments are a goal of the gut research led by Simon Carding and Tom Wileman at Norwich Research Park (hub of the Invest in ME Research Centre of Excellence for ME). It wasn't on the agenda that I posted above but they've spoken publicly about the possibility of developing bacterial-based therapies and FMT. That's in addition to the rituximab research, for which their hypothesis is that autoimmunity in ME/CFS originates in the gut.

This page links to the IiMER B-cell/rituximab and gut research:
http://www.investinme.org/research-projects.shtml

This is the intro page to the ME/CFS research at Quadram Institute (on Norwich Research Park):
https://quadram.ac.uk/targets/me-cfs/
 
So currently ongoing we've got:

  • CycloME-B (Fluge & Mella)
  • LDN (Olli Polo + Younger's pilot)
  • B vitamins (Rekeland)
  • Immunadsorption (Scheibenbogen)
  • Faecal microbiota transplants (someone in Norway)
  • Ampligen (Hemispherx)


The Ampligen trial started in 2005 and is open-label, with no control arm; it's unclear to me whether it's just a vehicle for allowing existing patients to continue therapy or whether it has any genuine scientific purpose.

I couldn't find what therapy, if any, is being trialled in Fluge's study of impaired glucose metabolism and PDH.

So in total, that's not much, considering the 17 million of us with no treatment and a quarter of us housebound or bedbound. :(

A single, small pilot trial in the US plus whatever the heck that Ampligen trial is. Zero trials in the UK.

Three of the seven trials in Norway, a country with 5 million people.
 
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