By: PR Newswire

Dec. 3, 2008 03:00 PM

CHARLOTTE, N.C., Dec. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- The four million Americans who

suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have new reason for hope today

with the announcement of an unprecedented research program to help identify

biomarkers for the illness and improve diagnosis and treatment of CFS. The

announcement was made by the CFIDS Association of America, which is funding

the program, called the Accelerate CFS Research Initiative.

As part of this initiative, the CFIDS Association also announced today

research grants totaling $647,940 to six research teams in the U.S. and

Canada.

"These awards represent a new approach to CFS research," said Suzanne

Vernon, PhD, the CFIDS Association's scientific director. "Instead of each

investigator working in isolation, we are building a network of researchers

and a framework for data sharing and collaboration not only among

researchers who receive grants from the CFIDS Association, but among

scientists worldwide."

Vernon, a microbiologist who helped pioneer the application of genomics to

CFS, is now working to pioneer this new CFS research network and to direct

the Accelerate CFS Research Initiative. "We were very impressed with the

number and caliber of grant proposals we received this year, which signals a

heightened level of interest in CFS research," said Vernon. "CFS, once shied

away from by some researchers, is now considered a legitimate and

challenging field of scientific inquiry."

The grant recipients are:

-- Gordon Broderick, PhD, of the University of Alberta in Canada, who will

study the immune and endocrine response in adolescent patients who became

ill with CFS after contracting infectious mononucleosis, which is caused by

the Epstein-Barr virus. By studying patients from the time they get

infectious mononucleosis to the development of CFS and through the first 24

months of illness, the researchers hope to identify disease progression

biomarkers, including those essential for early diagnosis.

-- Kathleen Light, PhD, of the University of Utah Health Sciences Center,

who will investigate the mechanisms involved in chronic pain that afflicts

40%-70% of CFS patients. This study will determine whether receptors located

on blood cells are increased and overactive in people with CFS and

associated with increased pain sensitivity. Light theorizes that increases

in specific receptors following exercise may be blood-based biomarkers for

CFS and could lead to a medical test to identify CFS patients.

-- Marvin Medow, PhD, of New York Medical College, who will investigate how

orthostatic intolerance, seen in many CFS patients, affects brain function.

This study will examine if CFS patients have increased pooling of blood in

the abdomen that results in reduced cerebral blood flow. Medow will also

investigate physiologic and oxidative stress changes associated with

disturbance in blood flow. These results will help determine if alterations

in blood flow affect brain metabolism.

-- Bhubaneswar Mishra, PhD, of the Courant Institute of Mathematical

Sciences at NYU, who will use state-of-the-art bioinformatics and

computational biology tools to create a computational model of CFS-a kind of

"Google for CFS" that will be part database, part knowledge-base, part

research network. This new resource will provide a "systems view" of CFS

that accumulates published CFS literature and experimental data to

disentangle complex relationships among reported findings and discover

causes of CFS.

-- Sanjay Shukla, PhD, of Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, who will

use metagenomics to determine if the ratio of good to bad intestinal

bacteria in CFS patients is altered, and whether this imbalance in gut

bacteria may be responsible for triggering CFS symptoms. Recent advances in

metagenomics have demonstrated the significance of altered gastrointestinal

bacteria in illnesses like HIV, diabetes, Crohn's disease, inflammatory

bowel disease and ulcerative colitis. Shukla theorizes that CFS patients

also have an imbalance of good and bad intestinal bacteria, resulting in

enhanced intestinal permeability-called leaky gut-allowing bacteria to move

across the protective intestinal barrier and causing chronic inflammation

and immune activation in CFS patients. This study will contribute to our

understanding of the relationship between the human microbiome and CFS. It

may also lead to new treatment options, including the use of probiotics.

-- Dikoma Shungu, PhD, of Weill Medical College of Cornell University, who

will use a brain scanning technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy

to confirm earlier findings that brain fluid of CFS patients contains

significantly elevated levels of lactate, a substance important in

metabolism. Shungu's team will also investigate the reason for this

phenomenon, exploring whether lactate levels are higher in CFS patients

because their brains contain high levels of toxic compounds that cause a

condition called oxidative stress (which could implicate chronic

inflammation), or because mitochondrial dysfunction is causing malfunctions

in the production of brain energy. If this study is successful, brain

lactate levels could provide an objective diagnostic biomarker for CFS.

The Accelerate CFS Research Initiative was made possible by the successful

completion of a yearlong, million-dollar fundraising campaign, the largest

research campaign for CFS to date in the United States. The CFIDS

Association has funded more than $5.4 million in CFS research since 1987,

making it second only to the federal government in CFS research spending.

"This was a real grassroots campaign, with most contributions coming not

from major corporations or foundations, but from ordinary people whose lives

have been affected by the illness," said Kimberly McCleary, president and

CEO of the CFIDS Association. "Patients, their family, friends and doctors

stepped up to give donations large and small to fuel the research

initiative."

"While support from individual American citizens is vital for research

progress," McCleary noted, "more funding from the government, from biotech

firms and from the pharmaceutical industry is desperately needed. CFS

affects more Americans than many other well-known diseases, but receives far

less research funding."

About the CFIDS Association of America

The CFIDS Association was founded in 1987 to stimulate high-quality CFS

research, improve the ability of health care professionals to diagnose and

manage the illness, provide educational information for patients and their

families, and build widespread public awareness of CFS. The organization has

invested more than $26 million in research, education and public policy and

is the largest charitable funder and advocate of CFS research in the U.S.

To learn more about CFS, visit http://www.cfids.org/cfs and

http://www.cdc.gov/cfs/cfsdiagnosis.htm

SOURCE CFIDS Association of America