In our “What’s New in ME/CFS?” series, we spotlight researchers transforming what we can do about this disease.
Recently, we spoke with Dr. Avik Roy, Chief Scientific Officer at Simmaron Research, and Dr. Gunnar Gottschalk, CEO and Section Chief of Translational Science at Simmaron Research, affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Their lab is doing something rare in ME/CFS research: taking discoveries from the bench all the way through to clinical trials.
“In ME/CFS, the immune cells have a chronic failure to produce energy. Both mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation and glycolysis are significantly impaired at the same time. In other chronic inflammatory diseases, there’s always a compensatory mechanism. I never saw both fail together, causing a global failure of energy production. That’s what makes this disease unique.”
— Dr. Avik Roy, Chief Scientific Officer, Simmaron Research
“As a long-time caregiver, the fact that no placebo-controlled trial has shown efficacy in 40 years and none has been conducted on a well-defined subset holds all treatment trials back. For patients who’ve watched science announcements for years, the steps of Avik and Gunnar’s research (molecular to animal models to treatment trial), and the potential of a biomarker-driven placebo-controlled trial is what differentiates their work, and is changing the field. And Solve has been a supporter of that work.” — Courtney Alexander Miller, Board President at Simmaron Research
In this conversation, Dr. Roy and Dr. Gottschalk share:
- Why ME/CFS causes a complete collapse of cellular energy production, and how autophagy impairment may be driving it
- What the rapamycin clinical trial is revealing about a subset of ME/CFS patients
- How findings from different labs are now converging on the same targets
There’s still much to learn, and we are so grateful to the researchers on the cutting edge doing this work.
Watch the interview with Dr. Roy and Dr. Gottschalk here.
Watch other videos in the “What’s New in ME/CFS?” series here.