In the most recent episode of “ME/CFS Alert,” host Llewellyn King interviewed Solve M.E. President and CEO, Oved Amitay.
Oved, a registered pharmacist and public health expert who has dedicated his professional career to the development of therapeutic options for people affected by rare genetic diseases, spoke to King about the recent $1.15 billion congressional investment in Long COVID research, explaining that this will allow researchers to track a condition similar to ME/CFS from onset, helping us to understand the effects of viral diseases on the immune system.
“Oved brought the lessons of a long and distinguished career to the subject of ME,” King says. “As a pharmacologist, he specialized in orphan diseases. Now he brings a research chemist’s eye to ME.”
The two also discussed whether ME/CFS is a disease with multiple dimensions, like cancer, and addressed the lack of knowledge and treatments available for ME/CFS, particularly in communities of color, who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19.
“My feeling is that the arrival of Oved on the ME scene is seminal and his impact will be considerable,” says King.
Watch the full interview here!
Llewellyn King has also previously interviewed standout members of the ME/CFS research community, including:
- Solve M.E. Chief Scientific Officer and molecular biologist Sadie Whittaker, PhD, discusses the clinical challenges faced by people with ME/CFS, particularly as they relate to the complexity of the disease and lack of public awareness. Watch here.
- Ramsay Grant researcher Michael VanElzakker, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard Medical School and Tufts University. VanElzakker lays out some of the challenges facing the research, diagnosis and treatment of ME/CFS, and the structural hurdles in the path forward. Watch here.
- Rosa Pari Ñaña, a physician from Peru who is researching ME with Dr. David Systrom at the Harvard Medical School. Watch here.
King also references Oved Amitay in a recent article about Long COVID and ME/CFS for Inside Sources. In it, Oved tells King that Long COVID gives researchers an opportunity to track the condition from onset and, importantly, to study its impact on the immune system – known to be compromised in ME/CFS.
Read the article in its entirety here.
