Clinical core co-director Dr. Betsy Keller presented on the second day of the NIH Accelerating Research on ME/CFS meeting. Dr. Keller outlined exertion intolerance in ME/CFS drawing upon her years of experience in the field. Her talk includes some preliminary data being generated from our NIH-funded Center. Dr. Keller’s complete talk can be viewed below.
At the NIH Accelerating Research on ME/CFS meeting, Alexandra Mandarano, a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Hanson’s lab, presented “Cellular Metabolism of Immune Cells”. The talk outlines a study that was performed in collaboration with Simmaron Research and focused on immunometabolism in people with ME/CFS as well as in healthy controls. To elaborate further, Alexandra Mandarano with the help of Jessica Maya, a graduate student in Dr. Hanson’s lab, performed Seahorse bioenergetics assays along with other experiments to better understand the metabolic fitness of immune cells from this population. Please see the video below to watch the full talk.
Center member Zhenglong Gu,
Dr. Maureen Hanson spoke on the “Next Steps for ME/CFS Research” panel at the NIH meeting “Accelerating Research on ME/CFS” on April 5, 2019. The text of her statement and some by Dr. Jose Montoya on the same panel can be found here. A transcript of the prior remarks at the meeting by Dr. Francis Collins is available here.
Our collaborators at Workwell Foundation have published a review concerning chronotropic incompetence in ME/CFS patients. What this means is that studies that have ME/CFS subjects exercise to a percentage of their maximal heart rate may be actually having the subject exercise at their maximum capacity, since their actual heart rate may often be lower than expected. Please see the link below to be directed to the publication.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2019.00082
This past November, @DrMaureenHanson visited the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan to participate in their distinguished speaker series. Dr. Hanson’s talk provided general awareness about ME/CFS and shared details on the Center’s research. In particular, the research topics covered were the functioning of immune cells, cellular metabolism, the microbiome, neuroimaging, and exercise physiology. While in Japan, Dr. Hanson spoke with a representative of the Japan ME Association. ME/CFS researchers in Japan hope to attend the April 2019 NIH meeting.
Let us welcome Carl Franconi to the Cornell ME/CFS Collaborative Research Center team. He will be joining us as the Manager for the Center for Enervating NeuroImmune Disease. Carl will be taking over the administrative workload from Ms. Susi Varvayanis, who has recently taken a full-time position in the Graduate School to pursue her interest in supporting PhDs interested in non-academic careers, a role she had been carrying out part-time while efficiently managing our NIH ME/CFS CRC.
The Hanson lab, which is a member of our Center, has recently published a metabolomics study in the journal Metabolites. Visit https://www.facebook.com/CornellMECFSCenter/ for a summary of the article. The complete publication can be accessed using the link below.
https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1989/8/4/90/htm
Arnaud Germain, David Ruppert, Susan M. Levine, and Maureen R. Hanson. 2018. Prospective Biomarkers from Plasma Metabolomics of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Implicate Redox Imbalance in Disease Symptomatology. Metabolites 8(4), 90
Center for Enervating NeuroImmune Disease