Building a Future for Research into ME IIMEC2
Building a Future for Research into ME IIMEC2
IIMEC2 London, June 2007
IIMEC2 2007 was our second annual international conference for ME.
The charity decided to make this a two-day conference - with themes for patients on one day and professionals on the second day.
This also allowed increased networking opportunities and increase the potential for one of the charity's main objectives - international collaboration between researchers.
Delegates and presenters from USA, Canada, Europe and South Korea attended and created a special atmosphere which is a credit to people with ME, their carers/parents and those researching/treating the illness.
We feel that good and useful connections were made - researchers discussing collaboration; ME Support groups discussing joint ventures and campaigns; carers and parents sharing experiences.
IIMEC2 2007 was our second annual international conference for ME. The conference regularly attracts clinicians, researchers, healthcare staff, charities, support groups and patients and carers from twenty countries around the world.
This allows unique networking opportunities and increase the potential for one of the charity's main objectives - international collaboration between researchers.
IIMEC2 Conference Agenda 2007
Norman Lamb entered Parliament at his second attempt in 2001, gaining this seat from the Conservatives. Norman Lamb read law at the University of Leicester. He worked for Norwich City Council as a senior assistant solicitor before joining Norfolk solicitors Steele and Co., where he became a partner and head of the firm's specialist Employment Unit. He worked for a year as a Parliamentary Assistant for Greville Janner, QC, MP. He was a member of Norwich City Council 1987-91, leading the Liberal Democrats for the last two years of his term. He has built a strong reputation in Norfolk as a campaigner for improved health services. He has been a critic of cuts in bed numbers and has highlighted the resulting unacceptable level of cancelled operations. As an MP his work on local issues includes adjournment debates on: orthopaedic waiting times in Norfolk; the lack of school transport services in North Norfolk; police funding in Norfolk; funding for Further Education Colleges; the provision of care for people with dementia; and coastal erosion. Norman has been Lib Dem Deputy Spokesperson for International Development (2001-02), a Treasury spokesman (2002-03), PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to Charles Kennedy (2003-05) and Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary (2005-06). He was a principal author of the party's policy on Royal Mail. From March to December 2006, Norman was Chief of Staff for party leader Sir Menzies Campbell. In December 2006 he was appointed Liberal Democrat Shadow Health Secretary. He has a particular interest in Africa: he has led Adjournment Debates on the HIV/AIDS crisis facing Africa and Asia, the controversial sale of military air traffic control system in Tanzania and the situation in the Great Lakes region of Africa.
Dr. Derek Pheby - Project Coordinator, National ME Observatory, and Senior Fellow, University of Hull
pidemiological Research and the ME Observatory plus Factors involved in the development of Severe ME
Dr Jonathan Kerr MD, PhD - Sir Joseph Hotung Senior Lecturer in Inflammation, St George's University of London, UK
Jonathan Kerr qualified in medicine from Queen’s University of Belfast (1987), and completed training as a medical microbiologist (1995). He has worked as a microbiologist in Belfast, Manchester and London, taking up post as a Consultant Senior Lecturer in Microbiology at Royal Brompton Hospital / Imperial College in June 2001, and then Sir Joseph Hotung Clinical Senior Lecturer in Inflammation at St George’s University of London in 2005. His interest in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) began during a study of the consequences of parvovirus B19 infection, when he showed that a percentage of infected cases developed CFS which persisted for several years. He is now the principal investigator in a programme of research in CFS. This involves development of a diagnostic test using mass spectrometry, analysis of human and viral gene expression in the white blood cells, and clinical trials of immunomodulatory drugs. Dr. Jonathan Kerr and colleagues at St. George’s University of London reported in the July 27, 2005 issue of the Journal of Clinical Pathology that a preliminary study of 25 CFS patients and 25 matched healthy controls revealed abnormalities in 35 of 9,522 genes analyzed using microarray technology. Polymerase chain reaction studies showed the same results for 16 of these genes. The study, and its results, raises some important questions. The first of which pertains to the need for funding of microbiological CFS research. He leads a group of 5 scientists at St George's. His research on gene expression has resulted in several published papers – including evidence of 7 distinct sub types of ME/CFS. Dr. Kerr also runs a ME/CFS research program. He studied the consequences of parvovirus B19 infection in ME/CFS and showed that a percentage of infected cases developed ME/CFS which persisted for several years. He has reported 88 human genes whose dysregulation is associated with CFS, and which can be used to derive genomic CFS subtypes which have marked differences in clinical phenotype and severity.
Professor Kenny De Meirleir - Director of the Human Performance Laboratory and Fatigue Clinic, Vrije Universiteit Brussels
As a neuroimmunologist, his main research focus has been to understand the bidirectional communication that exists between immune and neuroendocrine systems. A primary objective of the Delgado laboratory is to identify endogenous anti-inflammatory factors, mainly neuropeptides and hormones, that are produced under inflammatory and autoimmune conditions, with the aim of identifying therapeutic agents for immune disorders where tolerance is compromised.
Reno resident Annette Whittemore is President and Co-founder of the foundation. She became active in starting the foundation because she is the parent of a young adult who was severely affected by CFS and HHV-6 for the last 15 years. She and her husband are business owners and philanthropists in Reno and Sparks. She started the foundation with Kristin Loomis from California after a brief meeting in Incline, NV. with Dr. Daniel Peterson, a leading clinical researcher in CFS and HHV-6. "We wanted the ability to stimulate communication and research into the cause and effects of this illness. We've both felt the frustration of seeing too many doctors who could not help," she said. "Unfortunately for the sufferers of this disease, there have been very few doctors who have been able to understand the severe disability that HHV-6 and CFS can cause. By bringing world class researchers together we hope to unravel the path of this disease and develop new therapeutics while searching for a cure." Founder and President of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuroimmune Diseases, Reno, Nevada, USA. The Institute is located on the medical campus of the University of Nevada. Its mission is to serve those with complex neuro-immune diseases such as ME/CFS, viral induced central nervous system dysfunction and fibromyalgia. Annette Whittemore graduated in Elementary and Special Education at the University of Nevada and taught children with neuro-cognitive deficits, such as those found in autism, ADD, and learning disabilities. As the president and director of the current operations at the Institute Annette supports the basic and clinical research program, and actively recruits physicians and other support personnel for the Institute. (partially borrowed from HHV-6 Foundation Description - (http://www.hhv-6foundation.org/bod.htm)
With over 25 years of medical practice, Dr Daniel L. Peterson has become a sought-after internist for diagnosing difficult and complex medical cases. When several patients in Incline Village became ill with symptoms that resembled persistent mononucleosis, Daniel Peterson was one of the first physicians to recognize an outbreak of what is known as ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). He became a pioneering physician and researcher in understanding the biological characteristics and methods for diagnosing, managing and treating ME/CFS. He has also performed major studies of Ampligen as a treatment for ME/CFS, and studying the possible role of human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6) in CFS patients. See Wikipedia entry - click here
Dr. Vance Spence - Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine,University of Dundee Medical School, UK
Dr. Spence is a graduate of the Universities of London and Dundee. He was a Principal Clinical Scientist responsible for vascular services and research and, in 1997, he rejoined the University of Dundee Medical School as Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine, with the objective of stimulating research into the causes of ME.
Chair of the 5th Invest in ME International ME/CFS Conference 2010 was Professor Malcolm Hooper, Emeritus Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Sunderland.
Professor Hooper is an internationally-renowned expert on ME/CFS and a tireless campaigner for patients' rights.
Professor Hooper has previously chaired Invest in ME conferences and participates in The Hooper Interviews -
interviews with conference speakers at the Invest in ME Conference.
Ellen Piro is the president of the Norwegian M.E. Association. In 1995 she circulated a worldwide petition to get the CFS name changed and she personally brought it to the Dublin CFS conference to urge the scientists to make a change. Recently Ellen has been involved in the investigation into the use of meningitis vaccines in Norway and New Zealand and which has ben connected with the cases of over 250 ME patients. She has also contributed to the debate on the Norwegian equivalent of the NICE guidelines.
Dr. Byron Hyde attended the Haileybury School of Mines and worked as a geophysicist. He then did premedicine in the Faculty of Medicine and University College, University of Toronto, obtaining a degree in chemistry and nutrition. He graduated in medicine from the University of Ottawa where he was the Director and Chief of the International Exchange Program for the Canadian Association of Medical Students and Interns (CAMSI). Dr. Hyde founded the International Summer School in Tropical Medicine. He interned at Hotel Dieu in Montreal, was a resident at St. Justine Hospital in Montreal and at the Ottawa Civic Hospital. He also studied in Munich at the University Kinderklinik and in Paris at the Necker Hospital for Children. He was a research chemist at the Roscoe B. Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbour, Maine, a leading world laboratory in immunological research. Following this, he was Chief Technician in charge of the Electron Microscope Laboratory in Toronto at the Hospital for Sick Children, followed by a similar post at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hyde has authored a book on Electron Microscopy and two non-medical books. Dr. Hyde has been a physician for 25 years and has performed charitable work as a physician in Laos and the Caribbean. He held the position of Chairman of the Ottawa Community Health Services Association, and is presently Chairman of The Nightingale Research Foundation. In 1984, Dr. Hyde began the full-time study of the disease process then known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (renamed in 1986 by Dr. Gary Holmes in the USA to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). He has worked exclusively with M.E./CFS patients since 1985. In 1988, Dr. Hyde organized an association and founded The Nightingale Research Foundation, dedicated to the study of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He has also acted as Chairman of the 1990 Cambridge Easter Symposium and of the Workshop on Canadian Research Directions for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic fatigue Syndrome in May, 1991, at the University of British Columbia. (the above was extracted from the Nightingale Foundation.)
Common Campaigns: International alliances - joining the work between countries Guidelines Diagnostic testing Tissue Banks Local Services Questions
Dr Ian Gibson, former Labour MP for Norwich North, worked at University of East Anglia for 32 years, became Dean of the school of biological sciences in 1991 and was head of a cancer research team and set up the Francesca Gunn Leukaemia Laboratory at UEA.
Dr Gibson chaired The Gibson Inquiry into ME of 2006.
Professor Martin Pall - Professor School of Molecular Biosciences WWAMI Program Washington State University Pullman
Dr. Pall has long-term interests in biological regulatory mechanisms. His current research is focussed on a theory he has developed on the cause (etiology) of chronic fatigue syndrome and the overlapping and related conditions of multiple chemical sensitivity, fibromyalgia, and posttraumatic stress disorder. According to this theory, each of these is initiated by stresses that induce increased levels of nitric oxide and its oxidant product peroxynitrite, followed by a biochemical vicious cycle mechanism associated with chronic elevation of these two compounds. Symptoms of these conditions are produced by both nitric oxide and peroxynitrite and treatment should focus on downregulating this vicious cycle mechanism. Vitamin B-12 injections commonly used to treat these conditions are proposed to act through the action of one form of B-12 (hydroxocobalamin) which is a potent nitric oxide scavenger. Dozens of biochemical and physiological observations provide support for this theory. The most puzzling features of these conditions are explained by this novel theory.
Dr. Chaudhuri was appointed as a Senior Lecturer and Consultant Neurologist in July 2000. Research on fatigue in common neurological disorders is the main theme of Dr. Chaudhuri's work. He takes special interest in myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). His other areas of interest are multiple sclerosis, neuroimmunity, neurological infections and adult neurometabolic diseases. Dr. Chaudhuri was responsible for examining spinal tissue from Sophia Mirza prior to the inquest into Sophia's death.
Dr. Vance Spence - Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine,University of Dundee Medical School, UK
Dr. Spence is a graduate of the Universities of London and Dundee. He was a Principal Clinical Scientist responsible for vascular services and research and, in 1997, he rejoined the University of Dundee Medical School as Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine, with the objective of stimulating research into the causes of ME.
Dr. Myhill is a general practitioner with a particular interest in chronic fatigue syndrome. She qualified from Middlesex Hospital Medical School with honours in 1981 and has worked in the NHS and in private practice. Dr. Myhill is an active figure in the British Society of Allergy, Environmental and Nutritional Medicine, and its Secretary and has been medical advisor to Action for ME. Dr Myhill is interested in diagnosis in the correct sense, finding the cause of illness, not simply in treating the symptoms. She has a special interest in treating chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and have consulted over 100 farmers with CFS following organophosphate poisoning and 100 women with CFS following silicone poisoning either from breast implants or injection. Over the past twenty years Dr. Myhill estimates to have seen over 1,500 cases of chronic fatigue syndrome largely caused by viral infection. During the early years she reported these cases individually to the Medical Devices Agency.
Professor Kenny De Meirleir - Director of the Human Performance Laboratory and Fatigue Clinic, Vrije Universiteit Brussels
As a neuroimmunologist, his main research focus has been to understand the bidirectional communication that exists between immune and neuroendocrine systems. A primary objective of the Delgado laboratory is to identify endogenous anti-inflammatory factors, mainly neuropeptides and hormones, that are produced under inflammatory and autoimmune conditions, with the aim of identifying therapeutic agents for immune disorders where tolerance is compromised.
Dr. Byron Hyde attended the Haileybury School of Mines and worked as a geophysicist. He then did premedicine in the Faculty of Medicine and University College, University of Toronto, obtaining a degree in chemistry and nutrition. He graduated in medicine from the University of Ottawa where he was the Director and Chief of the International Exchange Program for the Canadian Association of Medical Students and Interns (CAMSI). Dr. Hyde founded the International Summer School in Tropical Medicine. He interned at Hotel Dieu in Montreal, was a resident at St. Justine Hospital in Montreal and at the Ottawa Civic Hospital. He also studied in Munich at the University Kinderklinik and in Paris at the Necker Hospital for Children. He was a research chemist at the Roscoe B. Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbour, Maine, a leading world laboratory in immunological research. Following this, he was Chief Technician in charge of the Electron Microscope Laboratory in Toronto at the Hospital for Sick Children, followed by a similar post at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hyde has authored a book on Electron Microscopy and two non-medical books. Dr. Hyde has been a physician for 25 years and has performed charitable work as a physician in Laos and the Caribbean. He held the position of Chairman of the Ottawa Community Health Services Association, and is presently Chairman of The Nightingale Research Foundation. In 1984, Dr. Hyde began the full-time study of the disease process then known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (renamed in 1986 by Dr. Gary Holmes in the USA to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). He has worked exclusively with M.E./CFS patients since 1985. In 1988, Dr. Hyde organized an association and founded The Nightingale Research Foundation, dedicated to the study of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He has also acted as Chairman of the 1990 Cambridge Easter Symposium and of the Workshop on Canadian Research Directions for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic fatigue Syndrome in May, 1991, at the University of British Columbia. (the above was extracted from the Nightingale Foundation.)
Dr Jonathan Kerr MD, PhD - Sir Joseph Hotung Senior Lecturer in Inflammation, St George's University of London, UK
Jonathan Kerr qualified in medicine from Queen’s University of Belfast (1987), and completed training as a medical microbiologist (1995). He has worked as a microbiologist in Belfast, Manchester and London, taking up post as a Consultant Senior Lecturer in Microbiology at Royal Brompton Hospital / Imperial College in June 2001, and then Sir Joseph Hotung Clinical Senior Lecturer in Inflammation at St George’s University of London in 2005. His interest in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) began during a study of the consequences of parvovirus B19 infection, when he showed that a percentage of infected cases developed CFS which persisted for several years. He is now the principal investigator in a programme of research in CFS. This involves development of a diagnostic test using mass spectrometry, analysis of human and viral gene expression in the white blood cells, and clinical trials of immunomodulatory drugs. Dr. Jonathan Kerr and colleagues at St. George’s University of London reported in the July 27, 2005 issue of the Journal of Clinical Pathology that a preliminary study of 25 CFS patients and 25 matched healthy controls revealed abnormalities in 35 of 9,522 genes analyzed using microarray technology. Polymerase chain reaction studies showed the same results for 16 of these genes. The study, and its results, raises some important questions. The first of which pertains to the need for funding of microbiological CFS research. He leads a group of 5 scientists at St George's. His research on gene expression has resulted in several published papers – including evidence of 7 distinct sub types of ME/CFS. Dr. Kerr also runs a ME/CFS research program. He studied the consequences of parvovirus B19 infection in ME/CFS and showed that a percentage of infected cases developed ME/CFS which persisted for several years. He has reported 88 human genes whose dysregulation is associated with CFS, and which can be used to derive genomic CFS subtypes which have marked differences in clinical phenotype and severity.
With over 25 years of medical practice, Dr Daniel L. Peterson has become a sought-after internist for diagnosing difficult and complex medical cases. When several patients in Incline Village became ill with symptoms that resembled persistent mononucleosis, Daniel Peterson was one of the first physicians to recognize an outbreak of what is known as ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). He became a pioneering physician and researcher in understanding the biological characteristics and methods for diagnosing, managing and treating ME/CFS. He has also performed major studies of Ampligen as a treatment for ME/CFS, and studying the possible role of human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6) in CFS patients. See Wikipedia entry - click here
Chair of the 5th Invest in ME International ME/CFS Conference 2010 was Professor Malcolm Hooper, Emeritus Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Sunderland.
Professor Hooper is an internationally-renowned expert on ME/CFS and a tireless campaigner for patients' rights.
Professor Hooper has previously chaired Invest in ME conferences and participates in The Hooper Interviews -
interviews with conference speakers at the Invest in ME Conference.
An open and interactive panel discussion allowing questions from the audience with audience participation.
Conference Report
The 2nd International ME/CFS Conference 2007 took place in early June 2007 in London and was attended by presenters and delegates from 12 countries, from Europe, USA, Canada and even South Korea.
Invest in ME would like to thank all those who took part in the conference for contributing to the wonderful atmosphere which was present during both days of the conference. Many travelled from afar and the conference was a success because of the character and of all. The atmosphere at the conference showed the positive and forward-looking side of the ME community around the world.
We believe that everyone left not only with an enhanced knowledge gained from the conference but also with renewed hope for the future treatment and possible cure for myalgic encephalomyelitis. The breadth of knowledge, science and experience regarding ME, as discussed and presented at the conference, is not only impressive but also exciting.
We hope that the many contacts which were established at the conference will continue and we hope to remain in contact with as many of you as possible. To see renowned experts on ME discussing with each other and forming or re-enforcing collaborative efforts was reward enough for hosting the conference. To turn into reality our efforts to form a world alliance of campaigning ME Support organisations was also justification for the conference.
And then there were the presentations from our distinguished speakers. An amazing amount of knowledge was presented showing the organic nature of myalgic encephalomyelitis. Invest in ME published its first Journal of IiME, which also served as a conference brochure. Invest in ME have produced a DVD of the conference and it can be ordered here. The complete presentation materials are available and included on the conference DVD.
Conference DVD
Location | Cost |
UK | £12 |
EUROPE | £13 |
OUTSIDE EUROPE | £15 |
The DVD contains 4 discs and is in PAL format- containing the full presentations from the 2013 conference plus plenary sessions, and the pre-conference dinner keynote speech by Linda Tannenbaum.
Order by Post
Send a cheque for the requisite amount (see above) to -
Invest in ME Research
PO BOX 561
Eastleigh SO50 0GQ
Hampshire
UK
DVD Details
Format: | PAL |
---|---|
Length | 380 minutes |
Contents | Full presentations from conference plus pre-conference dinner speech |
The views expressed at the Invest in ME International ME Conference conferences by the presenters and delegates to the conference and any information material distributed are their own personal opinions that are not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Trustees of Invest in ME/Invest in ME Research.
Invest in ME/Invest in ME Research accept no responsibility for the views expressed or any subsequent action taken. The contents of any presentation should not be deemed to be an endorsement, recommendation or approval of such content by Invest in ME/Invest in ME Research. The materials presented at the 1st Invest in ME International ME Conference 2006 do not constitute medical advice. No medical recommendations are given or implied by Invest in ME/Invest in ME Research. Any person registering or attending an Invest in ME/Invest in ME Research conference, or purchasing the DVD, who may take any action or consider medical treatment or referrals should take detailed advice from their own medical practitioner. Invest in ME/Invest in ME Research disclaims any implied guarantee about the accuracy, completeness, timeliness or relevance of any information contained at the conference.
By purchasing any of the conference DVDs you agree that Invest in ME/Invest in ME Research is not liable for any complications, injuries, loss or other medical problems arising from, or in connection with, the use of or reliance upon any information contained in the conference.
IIMEC2 GALLERY
PAST INVEST in ME INTERNATIONAL ME CONFERENCES
More details of previous Invest in ME Research conferences can be found on the current IIMEC* conference overview page - Click here.
Our Sponsors for IIMEC2
If you have any questions regarding the conference then please contact us by email and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Thank you for your interest in the charity.
IIMER are facilitating a strategy of biomedical research into ME.
The charity is currently funding possibly important research projects for ME in the UK with international collaboration.
Currently the main hub of research is at Quadram Institute Bioscience and University of East Anglia )
in the Norwich Research Park and we also fund research at UCL.
These involve a gut microbiota project in Norwich and B cell research
in London.
The IIMER Advisory Board is made up of eminent researchers who are helping the charity to form a credible and productive biomedical research strategy which will provide the best and quickest route for possible treatments and cures for this disease.
Translational biomedical research - an iterative feedback of information between the basic and clinical research domains in order to accelerate knowledge translation from lab to bedside and back to lab again - allows translation of findings in basic research more quickly and efficiently into medical practice to produce more meaningful health outcomes and facilitate the sharing of repositories and research-based facilities and laboratories. This is the model IiMER are attempting to promote in the proposal for an examination and research facility based in Norwich.
Let's do it for ME! is a patient-driven campaign to raise awareness and vital funds for a UK centre of excellence for translational biomedical ME research, clinical assessment, diagnosis and treatment for patients, training and information for healthcare staff, based around the Norwich Research Park in the UK and aiming to work collaboratively with international biomedical researchers.
In addition to the International ME Conference the charity also organises an annual International Research Colloquium which attracts researchers from around the world in order to discuss experiences and open up collaborations in order to find answers for this disease.
Invest in ME Research is one of the founder members of the European ME Alliance (EMEA) – a grouping of charities and patient organisations working together across Europe. Now fifteen European countries collaborating.
We welcome support to enable us to build and sustain a strategy of high-quality biomedical research into ME.
To support our work in developing a Centre for ME research please see this link.
Dr Ian Gibson, former Labour MP for Norwich North, worked at University of East Anglia for 32 years, became Dean of the school
of biological sciences in 1991 and was head of a cancer research team and set up the Francesca Gunn Leukaemia Laboratory at UEA.
In 2011 Dr Gibson received an honorary doctorate of civil law from UEA.
Professor Hooper graduated from University of London and had held appointments at Sunderland Technical College, Sunderland Polytechnic and the University of Sunderland,
where he was made Emeritus Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in 1993.
He has served at many UK universities as well as in India and Tanzania.
He has inaugurated links with Indian research institutions and universities and celebrated 25 years of productive
and on-going links which have,
particularly, involved the design and development of new drugs for tropical diseases and an exploration of natural
products associated with Ayurvedic medicine.
He has published some 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals in the field of medicinal chemistry together with major
reviews on the Chemotherapy of Leprosy,
the Chemistry of Isatogens. Edited one book on the Chemotherapy of Tropical Diseases.
He acted as a referee for a number of important journals and
served on one editorial board. He has served on committees of the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), the
World Health Organisation
(WHO) and the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC).
Professor Hooper is a member of a number of learned bodies, including
the Royal Chemical Society, the British Pharmacological Society and the Society for Drug Research (SDR),
now renamed the Society for
Medicines Research, where he has served on the committee for 12 years and served as Chairman for 2 years.
This involved the planning
and organising of major national and international conferences. He was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the
Gulf Veterans Association (GVA)
and accepted by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) as their nominee on the Independent Panel established to consider
the possible interactions between
Vaccines and NAPS tablets.
He has also served on the Gulf Support Group convened at the Royal British Legion. His involvement with the GVA brought
contact with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalegic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/M.E.) and related disorders. Gulf War Illness/Syndrome
(GWI/S) has much in common
with M.E./CFS.
He is Patron of the Sunderland and South Shields M.E. Association and a member of the Newcastle Research Group,
which includes eminent
physicians and scientists performing research in to CFS/M.E., where one recent aspect has been the identification of
organochlorine pesticide poisoning
being misdiagnosed as M.E./CFS. He has addressed meetings of the Pesticide Exchange Network and consulted to the
Organo-Phosphate Information Network (OPIN).
He worked with the Autism Research Unit (ARU) at the University of Sunderland for over 20 years, leading to involvement
in biochemical studies to offer help, support and treatment for people with autism. This has also lead to research and
urine-analysis of Indolyl-Acroyl-Glycine (IAG), which is an unusual metabolite found in excess of 90% of people
examined in different groups of GWV, M.E./CFS and Organo-Phosphate (OP) poisoning sufferers. He served on the
General Synod of the Church of England from 1970 to 1980 and he is a Christian Lay Leader, Preacher and Teacher.
He is currently involved in three environmental campaigns: Toxic waste dumping, including campaign against sewage in
the sea presenting to the Select Committee on
Sewage Treatment and Disposal GWI/S, presenting to the Defence Select Committee M.E./CFS and OP/Pesticide poisoning
Professor Simon Carding Professor of Mucosal Immunology at University of East Anglia and Institute of Food Research. Following his PhD at London he held postdoctoral positions at New York University School of Medicine, New York and at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, USA. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA as Assistant and later Associate Professor. He joined University of Leeds as Professor of Molecular Immunology in the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology in 1999. His scientific interests are in understanding how the immune response in the gut functions and in particular, is able to distinguish between the commensal microbes that reside in the gut and environmental microbes that cause disease, and in the mechanisms by which the body's immune system no longer ignores or tolerates commensal gut bacteria and how this leads to immune system activation and inflammatory bowel disease.
Professor Vincent is Emeritus Professor of Neuroimmunology at the University of Oxford, and an Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College. She holds an Honorary Consultant position in Immunology and runs the Clinical Neuroimmunology service which is an international referral centre for the measurement of antibodies in neurological diseases.
Together with colleagues she collaborates with neurologists worldwide. She was formerly Head of Department of Clinical Neurology (2005-2008), and is a Past President of the International Society of Neuroimmunology, and an Associate Editor of Brain.
She was a co-applicant and group leader of OXION, the Wellcome Trust-funded Integrative Physiology Initiative "Ion channels and Diseases of Electrically Excitable Cells". She is a member of Faculty of 1000 (Neuroscience, Neurobiology of Disease and Regeneration)
Her major interest is in the role of autoimmunity in neurological diseases, including multiple sclerosis and auto-antibody mediated ion channel and receptor disorders. Recent advances have included (a) the discovery that maternal antibodies to different fetal proteins can cause rare neuromuscular disorders, and may be involved in some forms of autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders; (b) the definition and characterisation of a new form of myasthenia gravis associated with antibodies to a receptor tyrosine kinase, MuSK, that performs an important maintenance role at the neuromuscular junction; and (c) the recognition that some central nervous system disorders, involving memory loss, seizures, movement disorders, can be caused by antibodies to potassium ion channels and to various receptor proteins.
In these, and several other conditions, new ways are being devised to measure the pathogenic antibodies for better clinical diagnosis, and establishing model in vitro and in vivo systems for investigation of the pathophysiology of the diseases. Her group also works, in collaboration with Profs David Beeson and Nick Willcox, on the genetics of myasthenia and the factors that determine autoimmune responses to the main target, the acetylcholine receptor.
Dr Landi works at Professor Michael Houghton's laboratory in the Dept. of Medical Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is a member of the ME/CFS committee of the Alberta Medical Association and Research & Medical Advisor, National ME/FM Action Network, Canada.
Professor Jonathan Edwards, of UCL's Department of Medicine, announced a highly original new treatment for rheumatoid arthritis in October 2000. His team has conducted trials of a new combination of drugs on patients who have suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for as long as 20 years; all but two of the 22 patients have so far shown marked improvements in their symptoms of the disease. More information IIMER Rituximab Clinical Trial for ME Professor Edwards has been the charity's advisor. He has played a major part in initiating the IiMER rituximab clinical trial project which IiMER and UCL initiated - click here
Mady Hornig, MA, MD is a physician-scientist in the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health where she serves as Director of Translational Research and is an associate professor of epidemiology. Her research focuses on the role of microbial, immune, and toxic stimuli in the development of neuropsychiatric conditions, including autism, PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infection), mood disorders and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). She is widely known both for establishing animal models that identify how genes and maturational factors interact with environmental agents to lead to brain disorders and for her work clarifying the role of viruses, intestinal microflora and xenobiotics in autism and other neuropsychiatric illnesses that may be mediated by immune mechanisms. Under her direction, proteomic analyses of umbilical cord samples are identifying potential birth biomarkers for autism in a prospective study in Norway, the Autism Birth Cohort (ABC). She established that there was no association between intestinal measles virus transcripts and autism, and, with Brent Williams and W. Ian Lipkin at CII, has found altered expression of genes relating to carbohydrate metabolism and inflammatory pathways and differences in the bacteria harboured in the intestines of children with autism. She also leads projects examining the influence of immune molecules on brain development and function and their role in the genesis of schizophrenia, major depression, and cardiovascular disease comorbidity in adults, and directs the Chronic Fatigue initiative Pathogen Discovery and Pathogenesis Project at CII. In 2004, Dr. Hornig presented to the Institute of Medicine Immunization Safety Review Committee and testified twice before congressional subcommittees regarding the role of infections and toxins in autism pathogenesis. Her work in ME/CFS is establishing immune profiles and helping to identify pathogens that may be linked to disease.
Her group focuses its interests on B cell depletion (an idea which they introduced (with the Professor Jo Edwards) approximately 10 years ago for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis), exploring more precisely how the technique works and trying to explain the marked variation in response between different patients.
Dr. Bansal trained in immunology and allergy from 1989 to 1993 at St. Mary's Hospital in Manchester and at Hope Hospital in Salford. From here he spent five years (1993-1997) as Senior Lecturer and Consultant in Clinical Immunology in the Department of Medicine at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, Australia. From 1997 to the present date Dr. Bansal has worked as a Consultant in Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology at Epsom and St Helier University Hospital. Dr Bansal's key interests lie in allergy, autoimmunity, CFS/ME and immunodeficiency. Dr Bansal is involved in the gut microbiota study at UEA, the IIMER rituximab clinical trial and Autoimmunity and ME, a study involving the hypothalamus - all projects funded by Invest in ME. Research from Dr Bansal
Claire Hutchinson is a vision scientist.
The majority of her work is concerned with how visual sensory information is encoded by the human visual system.
Her research includes healthy visual perception, age-related visual decline, and visual markers of 'non-visual' illnesses.
It is this latter strand of research that led her to study vision-related problems in ME/CFS.
Professor Staines has been a public health physician at Gold Coast Population Health Unit. He has worked in health services management and public health practice in Australia and overseas. His interests include collaborative health initiatives with other countries as well as cross-disciplinary initiatives within health. Communicable diseases as well as post infectious fatigue syndromes are his main research interests. A keen supporter of the Griffith University Medical School, he enjoys teaching and other opportunities to promote awareness of public health in the medical curriculum. He is now Co-Director at The National Centre for Neuroimmunology and Emerging Diseases (NCNED), Griffiths University in Australia
Invest in ME are pleased to announce that giving a keynote speech at BMEC5 will be Professor David Brooks from Imperial College, London. Professor Brooks is Hartnett Professor of Neurology in the Department of Medicine.
Professor Brooks' research involves the use of positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging to diagnose and study the progression of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases in life and to validate imaging biomarkers for therapeutic trials.
Professor Brooks will be giving a keynote speech on Imaging Inflammation and Its Role in Neurodegeneration. This is important for understanding and evaluating the role of imaging in diagnostics and may aid researchers involved in ME-related imaging studies.
To date, Professor Brooks has published over 350 reports in peer reviewed journals, including Nature and has an h index of 97. His research is supported by grants from the EU FP7 programmes, UK Medical Research Council, the Alzheimer's Research Trust, Parkinson's UK, the Michael J Fox Foundation, Lundbeck Foundation, Danish Council for Independent Research, and industry. He is Chairman of the Executive Committee of the EMBL Nordic Hub at Aarhus University and is a member of the scientific advisory board of Alzheimer UK. He has been a member of the scientific advisory boards of the German Dementia and Parkinson networks, the Austrian KLIF Science Fund, the Research Advisory Panels of the UK Parkinson's Disease Society, Inserm, the Michael J. Fox Foundation (2002-2006), UK Medical Research Council Neuroscience and Mental Health Board (2004-2007), UK Huntington's Disease Association, and was Chairman of the Scientific Issues Committee of the Movement Disorder Society (1998-2002) and a Director of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism (1993-1997). He was Chairman of the Council of Management of the UK Parkinson's Disease Society 1997-8. He is an Associate Editor of Brain and on the Editorial Boards of Parkinsonism and Related Disorders, Basal Ganglia, Journal of Parkinson's Disease, Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery, Synapse, Molecular Imaging and Biology, Journal of Neurotherapeutics, and Current Trends in Neurology. He was on the editorial boards of the Journal of Neural Transmission, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry and Movement Disorders. In 2001 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Science, UK. In 2002 he was invited to give the Stan Fahn Lecture at the International Congress of Movement Disorders, Miami, in 2003 the George Cotzias Lecture in Madrid, in 2004 the Charles E Wilson Lecture, the Psychobiology Institute, Jerusalem March 2004, in 2005 the Kuhl-Lassen lecture at the Society of Nuclear Medicine, Toronto, and in 2006 the Sprague lecture at UC Irvine.
Professor David Brooks BioWith over 25 years of medical practice, Dr Daniel L. Peterson has become a sought-after internist for diagnosing difficult and complex medical cases.
When several patients in Incline Village became ill with symptoms that resembled persistent mononucleosis, Daniel Peterson was one of the first physicians to recognize an outbreak of what is known as ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). He became a pioneering physician and researcher in understanding the biological characteristics and methods for diagnosing, managing and treating ME/CFS. He has also performed major studies of Ampligen as a treatment for ME/CFS, and studying the possible role of human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6) in CFS patients.
Dr. Peterson's experience as both a clinician and a research collaborator provides a unique perspective on CFS/ME for developing translational science.
Maureen Hanson is Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Previously she was on the faculty of the Department of Biology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where she also completed her Ph.D. degree. While most of her prior research has concerned cell and molecular biology in plant cells, she began a research program on ME/CFS after noting at a 2007 IACFS meeting the paucity of molecular biologists studying the illness. Her lab was part of the 2012 multicenter study organized by Ian Lipkin's group at Columbia University to assess the actual role of XMRV in ME/CFS. Dr. Hanson has a current project to examine the microbiome of ME/CFS patients and controls, in collaboration with Dr. Ruth Ley (Cornell Microbiology) and Susan Levine, M.D. (Manhattan, NY). Dr Levine is also collaborating with Dr. Hanson on an immune cell gene expression project that involves Dr. Fabien Campagne and Dr. Rita Shaknovich at Weill Cornell Medical School in New York City. Dr. Hanson's third project concerns analysis of blood samples from individuals performing a two-day cardiopulmonary exercise test at Ithaca College under the supervision of Dr. Betsy Keller.
Professor Jonas Blomberg is an MD and PhD, graduating at the University of Gothenburg. Has worked with Lipids at the department of Medical Biochemistry 1965-1972 as a Clinical Virologist in Gothenburg 1972-1979 and as a postDoc at John Stephensons Lab at NCI Frederick on retroviruses 1979-1981. He then worked as a Clinical Virologist in Lund, Sweden 1981-1995 and then as a professor of Clinical Virology in Uppsala 1996- to the present.
His main fields of interest are: Retrovirology, Bioinformatics, Clinical Virology and broadly targeted and multiplex methods for detection of microbial nucleic acid.
He also is interested in evolution and Infection biology.
Professor Blomberg is on the editorial board of Journal of Virology http://jvi.asm.org/site/misc/edboard.xhtml.
James N. Baraniuk was born in Alberta, Canada, south of Banff. He earned his honours degree in chemistry and microbiology, medical degree, and unique bachelor's degree in medicine (cardiology) at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Thereafter, he moved to Akron, OH, USA, for his internship and internal medicine residency at St Thomas Hospital. After another year of internal medicine residency at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, he trained with Dr C.E. Buckley, III, in allergy and clinical immunology. He moved to the laboratory of Dr Michael Kaliner at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, MD, and there began his long-standing collaboration with Dr Kimihiro Ohkubo. After 2 years studying neuropeptides, he joined Dr Peter Barnes' laboratory at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Brompton Hospital, London, UK. Dr Baraniuk returned to Washington, DC, and Georgetown University, where he is currently Associate Professor with Tenure in the Department of Medicine.
Ronald W. Davis, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine in Stanford, California.
He is a world leader in the development of biotechnology, especially the development of recombinant DNA and genomic methodologies and their application to biological systems.
At Stanford University, where he is Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center, Dr. Davis focuses on the interface of nano-fabricated solid state devices and biological systems.
He and his research team also develop novel technologies for the genetic, genomic, and molecular analysis of a wide range of model organisms as well as humans.
The team's focus on practical application of these technologies is setting the standard for clinical genomics.
Doris Jones is an independent medical researcher who investigates the dangers of drugs, particularly those causing ME.
She has been involved in ME issues since 1989 - since her son developed ME in 1980 aged 12 1/2. She carried out a very large multifactorial study into ME for which she was awarded an MSc in 1992 and has shown the results of that study, and subsequent independently conducted studies, at various international conferences. She was also a Reference Group member to the CMO's Working Group on CFS/ME and submitted numerous documents to that group, including results of a long-term follow-up study. She have recently made two submissions to the Gibson Inquiry - most of these details are on the 25% ME group website. Subsequently she had 2 articles published on exactly these links and associations, one was published as a Second Opinion item in the What Doctors Don't Tell You newsletter, Dec.1993, the other - a much more comprehensive overview piece with many references - was published in the March 1997 issue of Yoga & Health.
In her own research she has identified another specific group (a possible subgroup) of ME/CFS patients, i.e. those who attribute the onset of ME on an exacerbation of their existing illness to the use of the antibiotic Septrin / Bactrim (generic name Cotrimoxazole).
She has performed 2 separate studies on such patients, details of which were shown at the 2 international conferences on CFS and Related Disorders in 1995 and 1999 in Brussels and elsewhere. The abstract of the first of these studies was published in the Journal of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, 1996. This particular antibiotic was severely restricted in the UK in 1995 (and in Sweden already about 10 years earlier!). She has covered this particular topic in an article published in the November 1996 issue of Yoga & Health and again the DoH, the Health Select Committee and just recently the Gibson Inquiry have been informed of these links.
She has notified the Health Select Committee of these links for some of their inquiries (and indeed much earlier in 1992 the DoH!), and just recently has submitted evidence to the Gibson Inquiry.
Doris strongly believes that the link between vaccines and some cases of ME should be properly investigated as a matter of urgency.
Dr. Whittemore is a Program Director in the Synapses, Channels and Neural Circuits Cluster. Her interest is in understanding the underlying mechanisms of the epilepsies including the study of genetic and animal models of the epilepsies.
The major goal is to identify effective treatments for the epilepsies and to develop preventions. Dr. Whittemore received a Ph.D. in anatomy from the University of Minnesota, followed by post-doctoral work at the University of California, Irvine, and a Fogarty Fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
She was on the faculty of the University of Miami School of Medicine in The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis prior to working with several non-profit organizations including the Tuberous Sclerosis Alliance, Genetic Alliance, Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy (CURE), and the National Coalition for Health Professional Education in Genetics (NCHPEG).
She also just completed a four-year term on the National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council.
Professor Jason has been among the most prolific of all ME/CFS researchers.
For more than a decade, Professor Jason and his team at DePaul University's Centre for Community Research in Chicago have worked to
define the scope and impact of ME/CFS worldwide.
Professor Jason was Vice President of the International Association for Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome (now the IACFS/ME) and has been a key driver of CFS research since 1991, and is uniquely positioned to support
collaboration between CFS researchers, patients, and government decision makers.
His studies have shown that the direct and indirect costs of ME/CFS amount
to $20 billion in the U.S. each year, and more than 1 million people suffer from ME/CFS as opposed to
the estimated 20,000 people originally reported by the
CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
Nora Chapman, PhD is a Research Scientist at the University of Nebraska Enterovirus Research Laboratory and Associate Professor at
the University of Nebraska. Dr. Chapman studies persistent coxsackie infections in murine models of chronic myoccarditas
and dilated cardiomyopathy. She and her associates have demonstrated that selection of defective enterovirus
in heart and other tissues leads to persistent infections despite active antiviral immune responses.
Dr. Chapman is presently studying the mode of selection of these viruses and the effects of replication of these viruses upon infected cell function. Dr. Chapman and her associates at the University of Nebraska are further investigating Dr. John Chia's work in regards to enterovirus in the gut biopsies.
Source : Enterovirus Foundation
Dr Paul Cheney, MD, PhD, is Medical Director of the Cheney Clinic in Asheville, North Carolina. For more than 25 years, Dr Cheney has been a pioneering clinical researcher in the field of ME/CFS and has been an internationally recognized authority on the subject of ME/CFS. He has published numerous articles and lectured around the world on ME/CFS and is author/co-author of numerous publications and scientific presentations about ME/CFS.
Jonathan Kerr is Sir Joseph Hotung Senior Lecturer in Inflammation, St George's University of London. Jonathan Kerr qualified in medicine from Queen’s University of Belfast (1987), and completed training as a medical microbiologist (1995). He has worked as a microbiologist in Belfast, Manchester and London, taking up post as a Consultant Senior Lecturer in Microbiology at Royal Brompton Hospital / Imperial College in June 2001, and then Sir Joseph Hotung Clinical Senior Lecturer in Inflammation at St George’s University of London in 2005. His interest in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) began during a study of the consequences of parvovirus B19 infection, when he showed that a percentage of infected cases developed CFS which persisted for several years. He is now the principal investigator in a programme of research in CFS. This involves development of a diagnostic test using mass spectrometry, analysis of human and viral gene expression in the white blood cells, and clinical trials of immunomodulatory drugs. Dr. Jonathan Kerr and colleagues at St. George’s University of London reported in the July 27, 2005 issue of the Journal of Clinical Pathology that a preliminary study of 25 CFS patients and 25 matched healthy controls revealed abnormalities in 35 of 9,522 genes analyzed using microarray technology. Polymerase chain reaction studies showed the same results for 16 of these genes. The study, and its results, raises some important questions. The first of which pertains to the need for funding of microbiological CFS research. He leads a group of 5 scientists at St George's. His research on gene expression has resulted in several published papers – including evidence of 7 distinct sub types of ME/CFS. Dr. Kerr also runs a ME/CFS research program. He studied the consequences of parvovirus B19 infection in ME/CFS and showed that a percentage of infected cases developed ME/CFS which persisted for several years. He has reported 88 human genes whose dysregulation is associated with CFS, and which can be used to derive genomic CFS subtypes which have marked differences in clinical phenotype and severity.
Nancy Klimas, MD, has more than 30 years of professional experience and has achieved international recognition for her research and clinical efforts in multi-symptom disorders, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Gulf War Illness (GWI), Fibromyalgia, and other Neuro Immune Disorders. She is immediate past president of the International Association for CFS and ME (IACFS/ME), a professional organization of clinicians and investigators, and is also a member of the VA Research Advisory Committee for GWI, the NIH P2P CFS Committee, and the Institute of Medicine ME/CFS Review Panel. Dr. Klimas has advised three Secretaries of Health and Human Services, including Kathleen Sabelius, during her repeated service on the Health and Human Services CFS Advisory Committee. Dr. Klimas has been featured on Good Morning America, in USA Today and the New York Times.
Elizabeth (Beth) Unger, PhD, MD, received an undergraduate degree in Chemistry at Lebanon Valley College, Annville, PA. She then earned her PhD and MD in the Division of Biologic Sciences at the University of Chicago where she also began a residency in pathology. Her residency and fellowship was completed at Pennsylvania State University Medical Center. During this time, Dr. Unger developed a practical method of colorimetic in situ hybridization. This work led to interest in tissue localization of HPV and ultimately to her initial appointment to CDC in 1997 to pursue molecular pathology of HPV and CFS.
Dr. Unger has served as the Acting Chief of CVDB since January 2010 and has 13 years of experience in CVDB, where she has participated in the design and implementation of CFS research and HPV laboratory diagnostics. During this time, she was co-author on 25 peer-reviewed manuscripts related to CFS, including the often-cited descriptions of the Wichita and Georgia population-based studies. In addition, Dr. Unger has been instrumental in efforts by WHO to establish an HPV LabNet and serves as lead of a WHO HPV Global Reference Laboratory. She is co-author of 142 peer-reviewed publications and 24 book chapters and serves on the editorial board of six scientific journals. In 2008, for her HPV research accomplishments, she received the Health and Human Services (HHS) Career Achievement Award.
Dr Unger has been selected to serve as the Chief of the Chronic Viral Diseases Branch (CVDB) in the Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology (DHCPP), National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Per Julin is a specialist in rehabilitation medicine at the Stora Sköndal clinic in Stockholm, Sweden and also Senior Consultant, Neurological Rehabilitation Medicine at Karolinska Institute, Department of Clinical Sciences, Danderyd Hospital Stockholm, Sweden.
..
Professor Alexander MacGregor is a clinical epidemiologist, has expertise in genetic epidemiology (linking with the Twins UK cohort) and orthopaedic outcomes research thorough involvement with the national joint register.
Following her PhD, Dr West worked on the the c-myc transcription factor at the University of Leicester as a Post-doctoral Fellow before moving to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge to work on the regulation of HIV transcription. She moved to Sussex in November 2001 as an independent Wellcome Trust Fellow and was appointed as a member of academic faculty in March 2006, part-funded by the Wellcome Trust until March 2010.
Research expertise:
B cells, Cancer cell biology, Cell cycle, Chromatin, Epigenetics, Transcriptional regulation, Translational regulation, Virology
Prof. Tronstad completed his graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Bergen (UiB) in 2002. As postdoc at the Haukeland University Hospital, he studied bioactive compounds with the potential to modulate mitochondrial functions in cancer cells. In 2005 he was recruited to the Department of Biomedicine, UiB, where he started his research group to investigate metabolism and mitochondrial physiology. His laboratory seeks to better our understanding of how defective mitochondrial homeostasis may disturb cell physiology, and how this may be involved in mechanisms of cancer and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).
Karl was involved with the recent paper to come from Bergen - Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight. The Tronstad Lab investigates cell metabolism and mitochondrial biology and we are very fortunate that he can spare time to participate in the Colloquium.
Specialisms:
Metabolism, Cell biology, Mitochondria, Biochemistry
Research Associate at Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a British politician serving as Leader of the
Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition since 2015.
He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Islington North since 1983.
Theoharis Theoharides is Professor of Pharmacology and Internal Medicine, as well as Director of Molecular Immunopharmacology and
Drug Discovery, in the Department of Immunology at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA.
He was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and graduated with Honors from Anatolia College.
He received all his degrees with Honors from Yale University, and was awarded the Dean’s Research Award and the Winternitz Prize
in Pathology.
He trained in internal medicine at New England Medical Center, which awarded him the Oliver Smith Award “recognizing excellence, compassion and service.” He also received a Certificate in Global Leadership from the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He has been serving as the Clinical Pharmacologist of the Massachusetts Drug Formulary Commission continuously since 1986. In Greece, he has served on the Supreme Advisory Health Councils of the Ministries of Health and of Social Welfare, as well as on the Board of Directors of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Research and Technology, and he is a member of the International Advisory Committee for the University of Cyprus School of Medicine. He first showed that mast cells, known for causing allergic reactions, are critical for inflammation, especially in the brain, and are involved in a number of inflammatory conditions that worsen by stress such as allergies, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, eczema, fibromyalgia, migraines, mastocytosis, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, and most recently autism spectrum disorder.
He has also shown that corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), neurotensin and substance P, peptides secreted under stress, act together, and with the cytokine IL-33, to trigger mast cells and microglia to secrete inflammatory molecules. These processes are inhibited by the novel flavonoids, luteolin and tetramethoxyluteolin that he has helped formulate in unique dietary supplements and a skin lotion. He has published over 400 scientific papers (JBC, JACI, JPET, NEJM, Nature, PNAS, Science) and 3 textbooks with 29,887 citations (h-factor 84) and he is in the top 5% of authors most cited in pharmacological and immunological journals. He has received 37 patents and trademarks, including three patents covering the use of luteolin in brain inflammation and autism: US 8,268,365 (09/18/12); US 9,050,275 (06/09/15); US 9,176,146 (11/03/15).
Acting as Advisor, he was instrumental in the development of ibuprofen (Upjohn), Cetirizine (UCB) and Niaspan (Kos). He is also the Scientific Director of Algonot, LLC, as well as President of Theta Biomedical Consulting and Development Co., Inc., of BiomedAdvice, LLC, and of the nonprofit Brain-Gain.org. He is a member of 15 academies and scientific societies. He was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha National Medical Honor Society and the Rare Diseases Hall of Fame. At Tufts, he served on the Curriculum, Students Promotion, Grievance, Faculty Promotion and Tenure, as well as Strategic Planning Committees. He received the Tufts Excellence in Teaching ten times, the Tufts Distinguished Faculty Recognition Award twice, the Tufts Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence, Boston Mayor’s Community Award, and the Dr. George Papanicolau Award, as well as Honorary Doctor of Medicine from Athens University and Honorary Doctor of Sciences from Hellenic-American University. He is “Archon” of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Dr Johnsen works in the medical department at the University of Northern Norway in Harstad.
He is currently involved in the clinical trial of FMT which is being funded by the Norwegian Health Council.
Five million Norwegian kroner has been awarded for the trial.
The study is supported by Norwegian Research Council.
Together, it will be included 78 participants who either receive treatment with FMT from a healthy donor or placebo.
The study is double blinded, which means that neither participants nor scientists will know who received the treatment
from donor or placebo before the study ends.
Startup with the inclusion of participants begins during Summer 2018.
Dr. Nath received his MD degree from Christian Medical College in India in 1981 and completed a residency in Neurology from University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, followed by a fellowship in Multiple Sclerosis and Neurovirology at the same institution and then a fellowship in Neuro-AIDS at NINDS.
He held faculty positions at the University of Manitoba (1990-97) and the University of Kentucky (1997-02).
In 2002, he joined Johns Hopkins University as Professor of Neurology and Director of the Division of Neuroimmunology and Neurological Infections.
He joined NIH in 2011 as the Clinical Director of NINDS, the Director of the Translational Neuroscience Center and Chief of the Section of Infections of the Nervous System.
His research focuses on understanding the pathophysiology of retroviral infections of the nervous system and the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for these diseases.
Prof Markku Partinen is a neurologist and an internationally well-known opinion leader and expert in sleep research and sleep medicine.
Professor Markku Partinen is currently Director of the Helsinki Sleep Clinic, Vitalmed Research Centre, and Principal Investigator of Sleep Research at Institute of Clinical Medicine, Clinicum, University of Helsinki, Finland.
He has been the coordinator of the NARPANord Narcolepsy Consortium.
He became interested in sleep research while studying medicine at the University of Montpellier, France.
He obtained his medical degree (DrMed) from Montpellier in 1976 (Supervisor Prof Pierre Passouant).
He received his PhD in 1982 (epidemiology of sleep disorders), and degree of a specialist in neurology in 1982, in Helsinki, Finland.
He has worked as a postdoc researcher at Stanford University, USA in 1985-86 and in Bologna, Italy in 1987.
In addition, he has had several shorter visits as visiting researcher or visiting Professor at different Universities in Europe.
His main interests in sleep medicine have been narcolepsy, excessive daytime sleepiness and fatigue (including ME), sleep apnea, and parasomnias.
He has published more than 330 original articles in peer reviewed Journals in addition to writing many book Chapters and editing several books.
His Hirsch factor (H-factor) is 59 in ISI Web of Sciences and 64 in Scopus.
He has served in the Editorial Boards and as Assistant Editor in Sleep, Journal of Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine.
He has had many International positions in different research societies including Member of the Scientific Board and Vice-President
of the European Sleep Research Society (ESRS), President of the Scandinavian Sleep Research Society, President Elect and President of the
World Association of Sleep Medicine (WASM), Coordinating Secretary of the World Federation of Sleep Research Societies (WFSRS) and
President and Member of the Board of the Scandinavian Sleep Research Society.
He has been President of the ESRS congress in 1992 (Helsinki), the World Congress of Sleep Apnea in 2003 (Helsinki),
and the WASM congress in 2007 (Bangkok).
In addition, he has organized several smaller meetings and symposia in the field of narcolepsy, RBD and different sleep disorders.
Currently he is a Member of the Board in the ESRS EU-Narcolepsy Network (EU-NN) and Chair of Scientific Board of the EU-NN, President of the
Finnish Parkinson Association and President of the Finnish Sleep Research Society.
He has published
more than 250 articles in peer-reviewed international journals, several books and chapters.
Professor Heikki Hyöty is a professor of Virology at the University of Tampere, Finland
Professor Heikki Hyöty’s group has long experience in studies evaluating the role of viruses in type 1 diabetes and allergies.
He has published pioneering prospective studies and has made many new discoveries on the role of enteroviruses in diabetes.
One recent initiative is a project aiming at developing enterovirus vaccine against type 1 diabetes.
This long-term commitment to this particular topic has created a strong research center in Tampere.
Dr. Hyöty has previous experience from the coordination of large scale international research projects (for example two EU projects)
and the laboratory participates in international quality control programmes (e.g Quality Control for Molecular Diagnostics, QCMD)
and complies with general GLP and written SOPs.
Professor Hyöty’s group has also made pioneering work in translation of research findings
in collaboration with academic and industrial partners.
HPV vaccines and -complications
Mathematical analysis of hemodynamic response to Valsalva manoeuvre
Dynamic T-wave alterations and the autonomic nervous system
Mathematical analysis of cytokine response to LPS in humans
Autoimmunity in patients with possible side effects to HPV vaccination
Senior Epidemiologist, UK Biobank
Naomi Allen is Senior Epidemiologist for UK Biobank and an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, UK.
She is responsible for processing the linkage of routine electronic medical records into the study for long-term follow-up (including deaths, cancers, primary and secondary care data as well as other health-related datasets).
She helps to co-ordinate the introduction of new enhancements into the resource (such as the development of web-based questionnaires and proposals for cohort-wide biomarker assays) and provides scientific advice to researchers worldwide wishing to access UK Biobank.
Her academic research interests are in cancer epidemiology, with a keen research interest in the role of diet, obesity and circulating biomarkers in cancer development.
Dr Lesley Hoyles is a microbiologist and computational biologist, and an MRC Intermediate Research Fellow in Data Science (UK Med-Bio). The early years of her career focussed on the isolation and phenotypic characterization of novel anaerobic Actinobacteria. Her PhD studies at the University of Reading introduced Dr Hoyles to the gut microbiota, and led her to develop an interest in integrating various -omics and traditional approaches to look at microbe–host interactions and co-metabolism. After completing a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship in Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET scheme) at University College Cork to develop improved methods for the isolation and characterization of gut-associated bacteriophages, Dr Hoyles was awarded an MRC Advanced Scholarship to undertake an MSc in Bioinformatics with Theoretical Systems Biology at Imperial College London.
Subsequently, Dr Hoyles has worked in the field of translational systems biology at Imperial College London, using her unique skill set to investigate host–microbiome interactions and co-metabolism in humans, and animal and in vitro models.
In addition to her research interests, Dr Hoyles teaches on the MRes Biomedical Research stream Microbiome in Health and Disease. She is heavily involved in outreach activities, running Bugs In Your Guts and an after-school science club, and volunteering at the Turing House CoderDojo. Dr Hoyles is a STEM Ambassador and an Academic Editor for PeerJ.
Dr Karl Morten is a researcher and laboratory manager at Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford University.
Professor Kristian Sommerfelt is a paediatric neurologist at Haukeland University hospital in Bergen, Norway
.................
PhD Students at Quadram Institute Bioscience are Daniel Vipond, Fiona Newberry, Katahrine Seton and Shen-Yuan Hsieh.
Projects funded by Invest in ME Research are here - http://www.investinme.org/ce-projoverview.shtml
Dr Ben Seddon undertook his PhD with Prof Don Mason at the former MRC's Cellular Immunology Unit, at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford University.
There he studied the role and mechanisms of regulatory T cells in the control of autoimmunity in rats.
He then moved to the MRCs National Institute for Medical Research where he worked first as a post-doc with Dr Rose Zamoyska in the Division of Molecular Immunology,
and then started his independent research group as a Programme Leader in the Division of Immune Cell Biology.
He has had 10 years at NIMR establishing a research programme investigating the mechanisms of T cell homeostasis, generating novel genetic models of TCR and
cytokine signalling, employing mathematical approaches to gain systems level understanding and identifying novel roles for inflammatory signalling
for T cell maturation.
In 2013, he relocated the lab to the Institute of Immunity and Transplantation at the Royal Free Hospital Campus of University College London, where he is investigating the role of TNFSFR signalling and NF-kappaB transcription factors in the maturation and function of T cells in health and disease.
EDUCATION/TRAINING:
B.S.- Pharmacy - North Gujarat University
M.S.-Pharmacology - Northeastern University
Ph.D.- Pharmacology - Northeastern University
Anne Cooke began her academic career as a postdoctoral fellow. From 1970 to 1972, she held a SRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Sussex. From 1972 to 1973, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois and worked at the Medical Center, Chicago, USA. From 1973 to 1978, she held a Arthritis Research UK postdoctoral research fellowship in the Immunology Department of Middlesex Hospital. Then from 1978 to 1981, while remaining at Middlesex Hospital, she was a Wellcome Trust senior research fellow.
In 1981, she moved from research into teaching and research.
From 1981 to 1988, she was a Wellcome Trust senior lecturer within the immunology division of the UCL Medical School and also at the Middlesex Hospital Medical
School.
From 1988 to 1990, she was Reader in Experimental Immunology at University College London.
In 1990, Anne moved to the University of Cambridge.
From 1990 to 1996, she was a lecturer in the Department of Pathology.
In 1992, she was elected a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.
From 1996 to 2000, she was Reader in Immunology.
In 1999, she was a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.
On 1 October 2000,
she was granted a personal chair and appointed Professor of Immunobiology.
In 2013,
she retired from full-time academia; she was appointed Professor Emeritus and made an Emeritus Fellow of King's College.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Cooke
BSc (Hons) Biochemistry, University of Glasgow
DPhil Biochemistry, University of Sussex.
SRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dept Biochemistry, U. Sussex.
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Illinois at the Medical Center, Chicago,USA.
ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Immunology Department, Middlesex Hospital Medical School.
Honorary Lecturer, Dept Biochemistry, St Mary's Hospital Medical School.
Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, Immunology Department, Middlesex Hospital Medical School.
Wellcome Trust Senior Lecturer, Immunology Division, University College and Middlesex Schools of Medicine.
Reader in Experimental Immunology University College, London
Lecturer, Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge.
Reader in Immunology, Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge.
Professor of Immunobiology, Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge.
Honorary Fellow, University College, London.
Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
Honorary Degree University of Copenhagen
Associate Professor Petter Brodin's team at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden - is aiming to understand human immune system variation in health and disease, and understand the factors that shape human immune systems.
Other interests are in defining better metrics of immune system health and develoingp methods for better immune system analyses in human patients.
As a physician at the department of pediatrics at the Karolinska University Hospital, he has a particular interest in understanding when and how human immune systems are shaped early in life, and the influences by environmental exposures such as the microbiome, infections, vaccines, nutritional components etc in this process.
His team is firmly convinced that the way to understand human immune systems and their variation,
is to analyse all system components simultaneously and relathionships between these taken into account.
This have recently been made possible with the development of novel high-dimensional methods operating at single-cell resolution, such as Mass cytometry and scRNA-seq.
To analyze human immune systems at the systems-level, his team is developing novel experimental methods and algorithms for analyses.
Professor Huber studied immunogenetics at University of London and is currently Professor of Pathology at Tufts University, Boston, USA.
Dr Huber joined the faculty of Tufts Medical School in 1977, and her laboratory has investigated the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved
in the immune response since that time. She has studied the presence of retrovirus HERV K-18 as a marker for those who might develop ME/CFS after
an acute infection such as mononucleosis.
Her research shows that EBV induces the HERV K-18 envelope gene to trigger the expression of a specific
superantigen and that there are more HERV K-18 alleles in post-mono ME/CFS patients than in controls.
She hopes to identify other subsets among CFS patients.
Founder and President of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuroimmune Diseases, Reno, Nevada, USA.
The Institute is located on the medical campus of the University of Nevada.
Its mission is to serve those with complex neuro-immune diseases such as ME/CFS,
viral induced central nervous system dysfunction and fibromyalgia. Annette Whittemore
graduated in Elementary and Special Education at the University of Nevada and taught
children with neuro-cognitive deficits, such as those found in autism, ADD, and learning
disabilities. As the president and director of the current operations at the Institute
Annette supports the basic and clinical research program, and actively recruits physicians
and other support personnel for the Institute.
Dr Judy Mikovits obtained her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from George Washington University. She is Research Director at the Whittemore Peterson Nevada CFS centre for Neuro-Immune disorders and has co-authored over 40 peer reviewed publications that address fundamental issues of viral pathogenesis, hematopoiesis and cytokine biology. Dr Mikovits was co-author of the "Detection of an Infectious Retrovirus, XMRV, in Blood Cells of Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" research paper in October 2009 in Science magazine.
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Ronald G. Tompkins, MD, ScD, is the Sumner M. Redstone Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Founding Director of the Center for Surgery, Science & Bioengineering at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Chief of Staff Emeritus at Shriners Hospitals for Children―Boston.
The Center, a division of Surgery at Mass General, is a newly established center for research and innovation based upon the Mass General Burns Division’s collaborative track record and expertise in securing more than $200 million in federal, foundation, and industrial support for basic research and clinical programs.
It is a clinically-driven enterprise that engages in the basic sciences and engineering to solve everyday challenges in clinical medicine. The center promotes the development of new approaches to healthcare delivery and personalized medicine, minimally invasive therapies, as well as a myriad of new technologies such as re-engineered organs, smart nano-pharmaceuticals and nano-diagnostics, and living cell-based microfabricated devices for diagnostics, therapeutics, high-throughput drug screening, and basic and applied biomedical investigation.
He is a board-certified general surgeon with a doctorate in chemical engineering, which provides him with expertise not only in the clinical evaluation of critical care patients, but also in inflammation biology, genomics, proteomics, and computational biology.
Elected as a Director of the American Board of Surgery in 1994, he has received multiple honors including a fellowship from the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and an honorary M.A. from Harvard University. He has served as an officer including as President and Board Member of more than a dozen national and international academic societies. RESEARCH SUMMARY
Dr. Tompkins has published more than 450 research papers in medicine and engineering journals and has contributed to the advancement of science and engineering through service on institutional advisory panels, moderating mini-symposia and workshops on biotechnology, and studying the genomics and proteomics of immunology and metabolism resulting from injury.
Together with his Division colleagues, nearly 300 fellows have been mentored in the Division’s training programs with many excellent success stories.
Dr. Xiao serves as an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Xiao is internationally recognized in the field of Computational Genomics in Surgery and Medicine. He develops genomics tools and computational methods that can be widely applicable in clinical studies, study the human immuno-metabolic response in disease, and develop innovative approaches to address these challenges and to help translate genomic studies of patients to better disease diagnosis, prevention and therapeutics.
His area of expertise is in knowledge based analysis for the interpretation and integration of genomic data and computation to translate genome technologies to clinical research. For high-throughput, cost-effective analyses of human transcriptome in large scale patient studies, he developed the most comprehensive GeneChip to date (in collaboration with Affymetrix and Wing Wong).
Comparing with RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data, the array is shown to be highly reproducible in estimating expression at both gene and exon levels and reliable in detection of alternative splicing. In collaboration with Dr. Ron Davis and Stanford Genome Technology Center, he has developed bioinformatic and statistical tools for data analysis, especially for alternative splicing.
From The Center for Surgery, Innovation & Bioengineering
Biography
Dr. VanElzakker received a master's degree in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Colorado, working in Dr. Robert Spencer's neuroendocrinology laboratory, and a PhD in experimental clinical psychology at Tufts University, working in Dr. Lisa Shin's psychopathology neuroimaging laboratory. His postdoctoral fellowship is at Massachusetts General Hospital/ Harvard Medical School, at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, in the Division of Neurotherapeutics.
Dr. VanElzakker is interested in uncovering the mechanisms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and of myalgic encephalomyelitis - also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).
His PTSD research uses functional and structural brain imaging, behavioral attention tasks, blood, and genetic data to investigate what makes some individuals vulnerable to PTSD following trauma. He is interested in using non-invasive electroceutical medical devices to enhance safety learning, which may eventually serve as an adjunct to enhance exposure-based therapy for PTSD.
His ME/CFS research uses functional and structural brain imaging to look for abnormal patterns in brain metabolism and inflammation in this patient population. This research focuses on dysfunction at the intersection of the nervous and immune systems and posits that ME/CFS may be what happens when the nervous system detects an exaggerated and ongoing innate immune response. He is interested in using non-invasive electroceutical medical devices to enhance the anti-inflammatory vagus nerve reflex.
From The Center for Surgery, Innovation & Bioengineering
The Invest in ME Research Biomedical Research into ME Colloquium 9 (#BRMEC9) will take place in London over two days from 29th - 30th May 2019.
The ninth Colloquium aims to increase international collaboration in research into ME.
Dr Ian Gibson, former Labour MP for Norwich North, worked at University of East Anglia for 32 years, became Dean of the school of biological sciences in 1991 and was head of a cancer research team and set up the Francesca Gunn Leukaemia Laboratory at UEA. In 2011 Dr Gibson received an honorary doctorate of civil law from UEA.
Upon completing postgraduate work at the Medical Research Council’s Clinical Research Centre in Harrow, I “emigrated” to the USA to take up a postdoctoral position at New York University School of Medicine, and then at Yale University as a Howard Hughes Fellow in the Immunobiology Group at Yale University with Profs Kim Bottomly and Charlie Janeway Jr. While at Yale an interest in gamma-delta (γδ) T cells was acquired working closely with Adrian Hayday on molecular genetics and then with Prof. Peter Doherty to establish their role in (viral) infectious disease. I left Yale after five years to take up a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where I developed a research interest in mucosal and GI-tract immunology, performing studies in germfree mice with Prof John Cebra that helped establish the role of gut microbes in the aetiology of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
After 15 years in the USA, I returned to the UK to take up the Chair in Molecular Immunology at the University of Leeds where I established a new research programme on commensal gut bacteria and Bacteroides genetics leading to the development of a Bacteroides drug delivery platform that is being used for developing new interventions for IBD and for mucosal vaccination.
In 2008 I was recruited by UEA and IFR to develop a gut research programme, taking up the Chair of Mucosal Immunology at UEA-MED and the position of head of the Gut Biology Research Programme at IFR, which later became part of the Gut Health and Food Safety (GHFS) Programme. GHFS research covers a broad area of gut biology including epithelial cell physiology, mucus and glycobiology, mucosal immunology, commensal microbiology, foodborne bacterial pathogens, and mathematical modelling and bioinformatics. The success of this programme has led to the establishment of the Gut Microbes and Health research programme that is integral to the research agenda of The Quadram Institute.
Within these programmes, much of the work undertaken in my research group builds upon that carried out in the USA and latterly in the UK with a major focus on understanding the mechanisms of intestinal microbial (bacterial and viral) tolerance. In particular, identifying the pathways and mediators of microbe-host cross talk and the role they play in establishing and maintaining gut health and in diseases that not only affect the gut but other organ systems. This has led to the development of new research projects relating to the gut-microbiome-brain axis and understanding how the intestinal microbiome impacts on mental health and the development of neurodegenerative diseases, and the intestinal virome and the role that prokaryotic and eukaryotic viruses play in microbial homeostasis and dysbiosis.
Professor Vincent is Emeritus Professor of Neuroimmunology at the University of Oxford, and an Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College. She holds an Honorary Consultant position in Immunology and runs the Clinical Neuroimmunology service which is an international referral centre for the measurement of antibodies in neurological diseases.
Together with colleagues she collaborates with neurologists worldwide. She was formerly Head of Department of Clinical Neurology (2005-2008), and is a Past President of the International Society of Neuroimmunology, and an Associate Editor of Brain.
She was a co-applicant and group leader of OXION, the Wellcome Trust-funded Integrative Physiology Initiative "Ion channels and Diseases of Electrically Excitable Cells". She is a member of Faculty of 1000 (Neuroscience, Neurobiology of Disease and Regeneration)
Her major interest is in the role of autoimmunity in neurological diseases, including multiple sclerosis and auto-antibody mediated ion channel and receptor disorders. Recent advances have included (a) the discovery that maternal antibodies to different fetal proteins can cause rare neuromuscular disorders, and may be involved in some forms of autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders; (b) the definition and characterisation of a new form of myasthenia gravis associated with antibodies to a receptor tyrosine kinase, MuSK, that performs an important maintenance role at the neuromuscular junction; and (c) the recognition that some central nervous system disorders, involving memory loss, seizures, movement disorders, can be caused by antibodies to potassium ion channels and to various receptor proteins.
In these, and several other conditions, new ways are being devised to measure the pathogenic antibodies for better clinical diagnosis, and establishing model in vitro and in vivo systems for investigation of the pathophysiology of the diseases. Her group also works, in collaboration with Profs David Beeson and Nick Willcox, on the genetics of myasthenia and the factors that determine autoimmune responses to the main target, the acetylcholine receptor.
Dr Landi works at Professor Michael Houghton's laboratory in the Dept. of Medical Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is a member of the ME/CFS committee of the Alberta Medical Association and Research & Medical Advisor, National ME/FM Action Network, Canada.
Professor Jonathan Edwards, of UCL's Department of Medicine, announced a highly original new treatment for rheumatoid arthritis in October 2000. His team has conducted trials of a new combination of drugs on patients who have suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for as long as 20 years; all but two of the 22 patients have so far shown marked improvements in their symptoms of the disease. More information IIMER Rituximab Clinical Trial for ME Professor Edwards has been the charity's advisor. He has played a major part in initiating the IiMER rituximab clinical trial project which IiMER and UCL initiated - click here
Mady Hornig, MA, MD is a physician-scientist in the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health where she serves as Director of Translational Research and is an associate professor of epidemiology. Her research focuses on the role of microbial, immune, and toxic stimuli in the development of neuropsychiatric conditions, including autism, PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infection), mood disorders and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). She is widely known both for establishing animal models that identify how genes and maturational factors interact with environmental agents to lead to brain disorders and for her work clarifying the role of viruses, intestinal microflora and xenobiotics in autism and other neuropsychiatric illnesses that may be mediated by immune mechanisms. Under her direction, proteomic analyses of umbilical cord samples are identifying potential birth biomarkers for autism in a prospective study in Norway, the Autism Birth Cohort (ABC). She established that there was no association between intestinal measles virus transcripts and autism, and, with Brent Williams and W. Ian Lipkin at CII, has found altered expression of genes relating to carbohydrate metabolism and inflammatory pathways and differences in the bacteria harboured in the intestines of children with autism. She also leads projects examining the influence of immune molecules on brain development and function and their role in the genesis of schizophrenia, major depression, and cardiovascular disease comorbidity in adults, and directs the Chronic Fatigue initiative Pathogen Discovery and Pathogenesis Project at CII. In 2004, Dr. Hornig presented to the Institute of Medicine Immunization Safety Review Committee and testified twice before congressional subcommittees regarding the role of infections and toxins in autism pathogenesis. Her work in ME/CFS is establishing immune profiles and helping to identify pathogens that may be linked to disease.
Her group focuses its interests on B cell depletion (an idea which they introduced (with the Professor Jo Edwards) approximately 10 years ago for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis), exploring more precisely how the technique works and trying to explain the marked variation in response between different patients.
Dr. Bansal trained in immunology and allergy from 1989 to 1993 at St. Mary's Hospital in Manchester and at Hope Hospital in Salford. From here he spent five years (1993-1997) as Senior Lecturer and Consultant in Clinical Immunology in the Department of Medicine at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, Australia. From 1997 to the present date Dr. Bansal has worked as a Consultant in Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology at Epsom and St Helier University Hospital. Dr Bansal's key interests lie in allergy, autoimmunity, CFS/ME and immunodeficiency. Dr Bansal is involved in the gut microbiota study at UEA, the IIMER rituximab clinical trial and Autoimmunity and ME, a study involving the hypothalamus - all projects funded by Invest in ME. Research from Dr Bansal
Claire Hutchinson is a vision scientist.
The majority of her work is concerned with how visual sensory information is encoded by the human visual system.
Her research includes healthy visual perception, age-related visual decline, and visual markers of 'non-visual' illnesses.
It is this latter strand of research that led her to study vision-related problems in ME/CFS.
Professor Staines has been a public health physician at Gold Coast Population Health Unit. He has worked in health services management and public health practice in Australia and overseas. His interests include collaborative health initiatives with other countries as well as cross-disciplinary initiatives within health. Communicable diseases as well as post infectious fatigue syndromes are his main research interests. A keen supporter of the Griffith University Medical School, he enjoys teaching and other opportunities to promote awareness of public health in the medical curriculum. He is now Co-Director at The National Centre for Neuroimmunology and Emerging Diseases (NCNED), Griffiths University in Australia
Invest in ME are pleased to announce that giving a keynote speech at BMEC5 will be Professor David Brooks from Imperial College, London. Professor Brooks is Hartnett Professor of Neurology in the Department of Medicine.
Professor Brooks' research involves the use of positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging to diagnose and study the progression of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases in life and to validate imaging biomarkers for therapeutic trials.
Professor Brooks will be giving a keynote speech on Imaging Inflammation and Its Role in Neurodegeneration. This is important for understanding and evaluating the role of imaging in diagnostics and may aid researchers involved in ME-related imaging studies.
To date, Professor Brooks has published over 350 reports in peer reviewed journals, including Nature and has an h index of 97. His research is supported by grants from the EU FP7 programmes, UK Medical Research Council, the Alzheimer's Research Trust, Parkinson's UK, the Michael J Fox Foundation, Lundbeck Foundation, Danish Council for Independent Research, and industry. He is Chairman of the Executive Committee of the EMBL Nordic Hub at Aarhus University and is a member of the scientific advisory board of Alzheimer UK. He has been a member of the scientific advisory boards of the German Dementia and Parkinson networks, the Austrian KLIF Science Fund, the Research Advisory Panels of the UK Parkinson's Disease Society, Inserm, the Michael J. Fox Foundation (2002-2006), UK Medical Research Council Neuroscience and Mental Health Board (2004-2007), UK Huntington's Disease Association, and was Chairman of the Scientific Issues Committee of the Movement Disorder Society (1998-2002) and a Director of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism (1993-1997). He was Chairman of the Council of Management of the UK Parkinson's Disease Society 1997-8. He is an Associate Editor of Brain and on the Editorial Boards of Parkinsonism and Related Disorders, Basal Ganglia, Journal of Parkinson's Disease, Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery, Synapse, Molecular Imaging and Biology, Journal of Neurotherapeutics, and Current Trends in Neurology. He was on the editorial boards of the Journal of Neural Transmission, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry and Movement Disorders. In 2001 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Science, UK. In 2002 he was invited to give the Stan Fahn Lecture at the International Congress of Movement Disorders, Miami, in 2003 the George Cotzias Lecture in Madrid, in 2004 the Charles E Wilson Lecture, the Psychobiology Institute, Jerusalem March 2004, in 2005 the Kuhl-Lassen lecture at the Society of Nuclear Medicine, Toronto, and in 2006 the Sprague lecture at UC Irvine.
Professor David Brooks BioWith over 25 years of medical practice, Dr Daniel L. Peterson has become a sought-after internist for diagnosing difficult and complex medical cases.
Daniel Peterson is an American physician in private practice in the state of Nevada, and has been described as a "pioneer" in the treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).
He graduated from the University of Rochester School of Medicine, Rochester, New York, in 1976 and was an intern and resident at the University of Utah Medical Center from 1976 to 1979.
In 1979, he became a Diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine. He is president of Sierra Internal Medicine of Incline Village, established in 1981.
When several patients in Incline Village became ill with symptoms that resembled persistent mononucleosis, Daniel Peterson was one of the first physicians to recognize an outbreak of what is known as ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). He became a pioneering physician and researcher in understanding the biological characteristics and methods for diagnosing, managing and treating ME/CFS. He has also performed major studies of Ampligen as a treatment for ME/CFS, and studying the possible role of human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6) in CFS patients.
Dr. Peterson's experience as both a clinician and a research collaborator provides a unique perspective on CFS/ME for developing translational science.
Maureen Hanson is Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Previously she was on the faculty of the Department of Biology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where she also completed her Ph.D. degree. While most of her prior research has concerned cell and molecular biology in plant cells, she began a research program on ME/CFS after noting at a 2007 IACFS meeting the paucity of molecular biologists studying the illness. Her lab was part of the 2012 multicenter study organized by Ian Lipkin's group at Columbia University to assess the actual role of XMRV in ME/CFS. Dr. Hanson has a current project to examine the microbiome of ME/CFS patients and controls, in collaboration with Dr. Ruth Ley (Cornell Microbiology) and Susan Levine, M.D. (Manhattan, NY). Dr Levine is also collaborating with Dr. Hanson on an immune cell gene expression project that involves Dr. Fabien Campagne and Dr. Rita Shaknovich at Weill Cornell Medical School in New York City. Dr. Hanson's third project concerns analysis of blood samples from individuals performing a two-day cardiopulmonary exercise test at Ithaca College under the supervision of Dr. Betsy Keller.
Professor Jonas Blomberg is an MD and PhD, graduating at the University of Gothenburg. Has worked with Lipids at the department of Medical Biochemistry 1965-1972 as a Clinical Virologist in Gothenburg 1972-1979 and as a postDoc at John Stephensons Lab at NCI Frederick on retroviruses 1979-1981. He then worked as a Clinical Virologist in Lund, Sweden 1981-1995 and then as a professor of Clinical Virology in Uppsala 1996- to the present.
His main fields of interest are: Retrovirology, Bioinformatics, Clinical Virology and broadly targeted and multiplex methods for detection of microbial nucleic acid.
He also is interested in evolution and Infection biology.
Professor Blomberg is on the editorial board of Journal of Virology http://jvi.asm.org/site/misc/edboard.xhtml.
James N. Baraniuk was born in Alberta, Canada, south of Banff. He earned his honours degree in chemistry and microbiology, medical degree, and unique bachelor's degree in medicine (cardiology) at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Thereafter, he moved to Akron, OH, USA, for his internship and internal medicine residency at St Thomas Hospital. After another year of internal medicine residency at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, he trained with Dr C.E. Buckley, III, in allergy and clinical immunology. He moved to the laboratory of Dr Michael Kaliner at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, MD, and there began his long-standing collaboration with Dr Kimihiro Ohkubo. After 2 years studying neuropeptides, he joined Dr Peter Barnes' laboratory at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Brompton Hospital, London, UK. Dr Baraniuk returned to Washington, DC, and Georgetown University, where he is currently Associate Professor with Tenure in the Department of Medicine.
Ronald W. Davis, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine in Stanford, California.
He is a world leader in the development of biotechnology, especially the development of recombinant DNA and genomic methodologies and their application to biological systems.
At Stanford University, where he is Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center, Dr. Davis focuses on the interface of nano-fabricated solid state devices and biological systems.
He and his research team also develop novel technologies for the genetic, genomic, and molecular analysis of a wide range of model organisms as well as humans.
The team's focus on practical application of these technologies is setting the standard for clinical genomics.
Head of the Outpatient Clinic for Adult Immunodeficiency. Clinical Training in Hematology and Oncology.
Research interest in CFS/ME, Immunodeficiency, Cancer Immunology.
Ronald W. Davis, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine in Stanford, California.
He is a world leader in the development of biotechnology, especially the development of recombinant DNA and genomic methodologies and their application to biological systems.
At Stanford University, where he is Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center, Dr. Davis focuses on the interface of nano-fabricated solid state devices and biological systems.
He and his research team also develop novel technologies for the genetic, genomic, and molecular analysis of a wide range of model organisms as well as humans.
The team's focus on practical application of these technologies is setting the standard for clinical genomics.
Dr. Elisa Oltra is a professor of Cell and Molecular Biology at the Universidad Católica de Valencia “San Vicente Mártir” where she also works as a researcher in the area of stem-cell and cancer.
She obtained an M.S. degree in Biochemistry at the Universidad de Valencia (Spain) and later earned her PhD in Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Miami, FL (USA) where she stayed for her post-doctoral training and later, as Senior Scientist till 2006 when she moved back to Spain.
During her studies at the University of Miami she identified alternative 5´UTR sequences involved in regulating cell-cell communication through mechanisms of differential connexin43 expression in the heart.
She also isolated a novel essential protein (Ini) and demonstrated its participation in mechanisms of transcription and splicing.
In 2009 she started a project to investigate the molecular basis of Fibromyalgia having identified at present irregularities in RNAseL expression and miRNAs profile changes in the participating patients which could lead to a deeper understanding of the disease.
In 2012 she joined the IVP Valencian Institute of Pathology, also at the Universidad Católica de Valencia where she is currently studying a specific type of vesicles: the exosomes, as mediators of stem-cell based therapies.
She is also academic director of the first officially accredited Master degree in Biobanking in Europe in collaboration with the Spanish Network of Biobanking at the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Madrid (Spain). From https://publons.com/author/361418/elisa-oltra#profile
Professor Wileman is Professor of Infection and Immunity & Director and Director at Biomedical Research Centre at Univ. of East Anglia.
He was Head of Dep. Immunology and Pathology and Virus Cell Biology Group at Institute of Animal Health; Assistant Professor at Dep. Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Claudia Adam's Barr Investigator in Cancer Research, Dept. Molecular Immunology, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School; Fellow of the Parker Francis Pulmonary Research Foundation, Dept.Cell Biology, Washington Univ. Medical School.
Dr. Whittemore is a Program Director in the Synapses, Channels and Neural Circuits Cluster. Her interest is in understanding the underlying mechanisms of the epilepsies including the study of genetic and animal models of the epilepsies.
The major goal is to identify effective treatments for the epilepsies and to develop preventions. Dr. Whittemore received a Ph.D. in anatomy from the University of Minnesota, followed by post-doctoral work at the University of California, Irvine, and a Fogarty Fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
She was on the faculty of the University of Miami School of Medicine in The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis prior to working with several non-profit organizations including the Tuberous Sclerosis Alliance, Genetic Alliance, Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy (CURE), and the National Coalition for Health Professional Education in Genetics (NCHPEG).
She also just completed a four-year term on the National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council.
Professor Wileman is Professor of Infection and Immunity & Director and Director at Biomedical Research Centre at Univ. of East Anglia.
He was Head of Dep. Immunology and Pathology and Virus Cell Biology Group at Institute of Animal Health; Assistant Professor at Dep. Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Claudia Adam's Barr Investigator in Cancer Research, Dept. Molecular Immunology, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School; Fellow of the Parker Francis Pulmonary Research Foundation, Dept.Cell Biology, Washington Univ. Medical School.
The IrsiCaixa Institute for AIDS Research IRSI Caixa works alongside the most prestigious international research centres, and its publications are among those with the most impact in their field.
Dr Blanco has vast experience in HIV related research but has also been involved in ME/CFS research as in 2013 his group published the paper , Screening NK-, B- and T-cell phenotype and function in patients suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Curriu et al. Journal of Translational Medicine 2013, 11:68.
Jakob Theorell started his medical training at Karolinska Institutet in 2007.
He is currently enrolled in the MD-PhD Program at Karolinska Institutet.
He works in the Yenan Bryceson Group
in Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.
His work focuses on understanding the mechanisms of disease in patients suffering from chronic immunodeficiency syndromes.
The Yenan Bryceson Group is based at the Center for Infectious Medicine and employs a wide range of techniques including multiparameter flow cytometry, confocal microscopy, live-cell imaging, next-generation sequencing, and biochemical techniques. To gain clinical and scientific insights into human diseases, we collaborate closely with clinicians at Karolinska Institutet, across Scandinavia and the rest of the world.
Nancy Klimas, MD, has more than 30 years of professional experience and has achieved international recognition for her research and clinical efforts in multi-symptom disorders, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Gulf War Illness (GWI), Fibromyalgia, and other Neuro Immune Disorders. She is immediate past president of the International Association for CFS and ME (IACFS/ME), a professional organization of clinicians and investigators, and is also a member of the VA Research Advisory Committee for GWI, the NIH P2P CFS Committee, and the Institute of Medicine ME/CFS Review Panel. Dr. Klimas has advised three Secretaries of Health and Human Services, including Kathleen Sabelius, during her repeated service on the Health and Human Services CFS Advisory Committee. Dr. Klimas has been featured on Good Morning America, in USA Today and the New York Times.
Elizabeth (Beth) Unger, PhD, MD, received an undergraduate degree in Chemistry at Lebanon Valley College, Annville, PA. She then earned her PhD and MD in the Division of Biologic Sciences at the University of Chicago where she also began a residency in pathology. Her residency and fellowship was completed at Pennsylvania State University Medical Center. During this time, Dr. Unger developed a practical method of colorimetic in situ hybridization. This work led to interest in tissue localization of HPV and ultimately to her initial appointment to CDC in 1997 to pursue molecular pathology of HPV and CFS.
Dr. Unger has served as the Acting Chief of CVDB since January 2010 and has 13 years of experience in CVDB, where she has participated in the design and implementation of CFS research and HPV laboratory diagnostics. During this time, she was co-author on 25 peer-reviewed manuscripts related to CFS, including the often-cited descriptions of the Wichita and Georgia population-based studies. In addition, Dr. Unger has been instrumental in efforts by WHO to establish an HPV LabNet and serves as lead of a WHO HPV Global Reference Laboratory. She is co-author of 142 peer-reviewed publications and 24 book chapters and serves on the editorial board of six scientific journals. In 2008, for her HPV research accomplishments, she received the Health and Human Services (HHS) Career Achievement Award.
Dr Unger has been selected to serve as the Chief of the Chronic Viral Diseases Branch (CVDB) in the Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology (DHCPP), National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Per Julin is a specialist in rehabilitation medicine at the Stora Sköndal clinic in Stockholm, Sweden and also Senior Consultant, Neurological Rehabilitation Medicine at Karolinska Institute, Department of Clinical Sciences, Danderyd Hospital Stockholm, Sweden.
..
Professor Alexander MacGregor is a clinical epidemiologist, has expertise in genetic epidemiology (linking with the Twins UK cohort) and orthopaedic outcomes research thorough involvement with the national joint register.
Following her PhD, Dr West worked on the the c-myc transcription factor at the University of Leicester as a Post-doctoral Fellow before moving to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge to work on the regulation of HIV transcription. She moved to Sussex in November 2001 as an independent Wellcome Trust Fellow and was appointed as a member of academic faculty in March 2006, part-funded by the Wellcome Trust until March 2010.
Research expertise:
B cells, Cancer cell biology, Cell cycle, Chromatin, Epigenetics, Transcriptional regulation, Translational regulation, Virology
Prof. Tronstad completed his graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Bergen (UiB) in 2002. As postdoc at the Haukeland University Hospital, he studied bioactive compounds with the potential to modulate mitochondrial functions in cancer cells. In 2005 he was recruited to the Department of Biomedicine, UiB, where he started his research group to investigate metabolism and mitochondrial physiology. His laboratory seeks to better our understanding of how defective mitochondrial homeostasis may disturb cell physiology, and how this may be involved in mechanisms of cancer and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).
Karl was involved with the recent paper to come from Bergen - Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight. The Tronstad Lab investigates cell metabolism and mitochondrial biology and we are very fortunate that he can spare time to participate in the Colloquium.
Specialisms:
Metabolism, Cell biology, Mitochondria, Biochemistry
Research Associate at Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a British politician serving as Leader of the
Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition since 2015.
He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Islington North since 1983.
Theoharis Theoharides is Professor of Pharmacology and Internal Medicine, as well as Director of Molecular Immunopharmacology and
Drug Discovery, in the Department of Immunology at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA.
He was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and graduated with Honors from Anatolia College.
He received all his degrees with Honors from Yale University, and was awarded the Dean’s Research Award and the Winternitz Prize
in Pathology.
He trained in internal medicine at New England Medical Center, which awarded him the Oliver Smith Award “recognizing excellence, compassion and service.” He also received a Certificate in Global Leadership from the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He has been serving as the Clinical Pharmacologist of the Massachusetts Drug Formulary Commission continuously since 1986. In Greece, he has served on the Supreme Advisory Health Councils of the Ministries of Health and of Social Welfare, as well as on the Board of Directors of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Research and Technology, and he is a member of the International Advisory Committee for the University of Cyprus School of Medicine. He first showed that mast cells, known for causing allergic reactions, are critical for inflammation, especially in the brain, and are involved in a number of inflammatory conditions that worsen by stress such as allergies, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, eczema, fibromyalgia, migraines, mastocytosis, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, and most recently autism spectrum disorder.
He has also shown that corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), neurotensin and substance P, peptides secreted under stress, act together, and with the cytokine IL-33, to trigger mast cells and microglia to secrete inflammatory molecules. These processes are inhibited by the novel flavonoids, luteolin and tetramethoxyluteolin that he has helped formulate in unique dietary supplements and a skin lotion. He has published over 400 scientific papers (JBC, JACI, JPET, NEJM, Nature, PNAS, Science) and 3 textbooks with 29,887 citations (h-factor 84) and he is in the top 5% of authors most cited in pharmacological and immunological journals. He has received 37 patents and trademarks, including three patents covering the use of luteolin in brain inflammation and autism: US 8,268,365 (09/18/12); US 9,050,275 (06/09/15); US 9,176,146 (11/03/15).
Acting as Advisor, he was instrumental in the development of ibuprofen (Upjohn), Cetirizine (UCB) and Niaspan (Kos). He is also the Scientific Director of Algonot, LLC, as well as President of Theta Biomedical Consulting and Development Co., Inc., of BiomedAdvice, LLC, and of the nonprofit Brain-Gain.org. He is a member of 15 academies and scientific societies. He was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha National Medical Honor Society and the Rare Diseases Hall of Fame. At Tufts, he served on the Curriculum, Students Promotion, Grievance, Faculty Promotion and Tenure, as well as Strategic Planning Committees. He received the Tufts Excellence in Teaching ten times, the Tufts Distinguished Faculty Recognition Award twice, the Tufts Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence, Boston Mayor’s Community Award, and the Dr. George Papanicolau Award, as well as Honorary Doctor of Medicine from Athens University and Honorary Doctor of Sciences from Hellenic-American University. He is “Archon” of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Dr Johnsen works in the medical department at the University of Northern Norway in Harstad.
He is currently involved in the clinical trial of FMT which is being funded by the Norwegian Health Council.
Five million Norwegian kroner has been awarded for the trial.
The study is supported by Norwegian Research Council.
Together, it will be included 78 participants who either receive treatment with FMT from a healthy donor or placebo.
The study is double blinded, which means that neither participants nor scientists will know who received the treatment
from donor or placebo before the study ends.
Startup with the inclusion of participants begins during Summer 2018.
Dr. Nath received his MD degree from Christian Medical College in India in 1981 and completed a residency in Neurology from University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, followed by a fellowship in Multiple Sclerosis and Neurovirology at the same institution and then a fellowship in Neuro-AIDS at NINDS.
He held faculty positions at the University of Manitoba (1990-97) and the University of Kentucky (1997-02).
In 2002, he joined Johns Hopkins University as Professor of Neurology and Director of the Division of Neuroimmunology and Neurological Infections.
He joined NIH in 2011 as the Clinical Director of NINDS, the Director of the Translational Neuroscience Center and Chief of the Section of Infections of the Nervous System.
His research focuses on understanding the pathophysiology of retroviral infections of the nervous system and the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for these diseases.
Prof Markku Partinen is a neurologist and an internationally well-known opinion leader and expert in sleep research and sleep medicine.
Professor Markku Partinen is currently Director of the Helsinki Sleep Clinic, Vitalmed Research Centre, and Principal Investigator of Sleep Research at Institute of Clinical Medicine, Clinicum, University of Helsinki, Finland.
He has been the coordinator of the NARPANord Narcolepsy Consortium.
He became interested in sleep research while studying medicine at the University of Montpellier, France.
He obtained his medical degree (DrMed) from Montpellier in 1976 (Supervisor Prof Pierre Passouant).
He received his PhD in 1982 (epidemiology of sleep disorders), and degree of a specialist in neurology in 1982, in Helsinki, Finland.
He has worked as a postdoc researcher at Stanford University, USA in 1985-86 and in Bologna, Italy in 1987.
In addition, he has had several shorter visits as visiting researcher or visiting Professor at different Universities in Europe.
His main interests in sleep medicine have been narcolepsy, excessive daytime sleepiness and fatigue (including ME), sleep apnea, and parasomnias.
He has published more than 330 original articles in peer reviewed Journals in addition to writing many book Chapters and editing several books.
His Hirsch factor (H-factor) is 59 in ISI Web of Sciences and 64 in Scopus.
He has served in the Editorial Boards and as Assistant Editor in Sleep, Journal of Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine.
He has had many International positions in different research societies including Member of the Scientific Board and Vice-President
of the European Sleep Research Society (ESRS), President of the Scandinavian Sleep Research Society, President Elect and President of the
World Association of Sleep Medicine (WASM), Coordinating Secretary of the World Federation of Sleep Research Societies (WFSRS) and
President and Member of the Board of the Scandinavian Sleep Research Society.
He has been President of the ESRS congress in 1992 (Helsinki), the World Congress of Sleep Apnea in 2003 (Helsinki),
and the WASM congress in 2007 (Bangkok).
In addition, he has organized several smaller meetings and symposia in the field of narcolepsy, RBD and different sleep disorders.
Currently he is a Member of the Board in the ESRS EU-Narcolepsy Network (EU-NN) and Chair of Scientific Board of the EU-NN, President of the
Finnish Parkinson Association and President of the Finnish Sleep Research Society.
He has published
more than 250 articles in peer-reviewed international journals, several books and chapters.
Professor Heikki Hyöty is a professor of Virology at the University of Tampere, Finland
Professor Heikki Hyöty’s group has long experience in studies evaluating the role of viruses in type 1 diabetes and allergies.
He has published pioneering prospective studies and has made many new discoveries on the role of enteroviruses in diabetes.
One recent initiative is a project aiming at developing enterovirus vaccine against type 1 diabetes.
This long-term commitment to this particular topic has created a strong research center in Tampere.
Dr. Hyöty has previous experience from the coordination of large scale international research projects (for example two EU projects)
and the laboratory participates in international quality control programmes (e.g Quality Control for Molecular Diagnostics, QCMD)
and complies with general GLP and written SOPs.
Professor Hyöty’s group has also made pioneering work in translation of research findings
in collaboration with academic and industrial partners.
HPV vaccines and -complications
Mathematical analysis of hemodynamic response to Valsalva manoeuvre
Dynamic T-wave alterations and the autonomic nervous system
Mathematical analysis of cytokine response to LPS in humans
Autoimmunity in patients with possible side effects to HPV vaccination
Senior Epidemiologist, UK Biobank
Naomi Allen is Senior Epidemiologist for UK Biobank and an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, UK.
She is responsible for processing the linkage of routine electronic medical records into the study for long-term follow-up (including deaths, cancers, primary and secondary care data as well as other health-related datasets).
She helps to co-ordinate the introduction of new enhancements into the resource (such as the development of web-based questionnaires and proposals for cohort-wide biomarker assays) and provides scientific advice to researchers worldwide wishing to access UK Biobank.
Her academic research interests are in cancer epidemiology, with a keen research interest in the role of diet, obesity and circulating biomarkers in cancer development.
Dr Lesley Hoyles is a microbiologist and computational biologist, and an MRC Intermediate Research Fellow in Data Science (UK Med-Bio). The early years of her career focussed on the isolation and phenotypic characterization of novel anaerobic Actinobacteria. Her PhD studies at the University of Reading introduced Dr Hoyles to the gut microbiota, and led her to develop an interest in integrating various -omics and traditional approaches to look at microbe–host interactions and co-metabolism. After completing a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship in Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET scheme) at University College Cork to develop improved methods for the isolation and characterization of gut-associated bacteriophages, Dr Hoyles was awarded an MRC Advanced Scholarship to undertake an MSc in Bioinformatics with Theoretical Systems Biology at Imperial College London.
Subsequently, Dr Hoyles has worked in the field of translational systems biology at Imperial College London, using her unique skill set to investigate host–microbiome interactions and co-metabolism in humans, and animal and in vitro models.
In addition to her research interests, Dr Hoyles teaches on the MRes Biomedical Research stream Microbiome in Health and Disease. She is heavily involved in outreach activities, running Bugs In Your Guts and an after-school science club, and volunteering at the Turing House CoderDojo. Dr Hoyles is a STEM Ambassador and an Academic Editor for PeerJ.
Dr Karl Morten is a researcher and laboratory manager at Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford University.
Professor Kristian Sommerfelt is a paediatric neurologist at Haukeland University hospital in Bergen, Norway
.................
PhD Students at Quadram Institute Bioscience are Daniel Vipond, Fiona Newberry, Katahrine Seton and Shen-Yuan Hsieh.
Projects funded by Invest in ME Research are here - http://www.investinme.org/ce-projoverview.shtml
Dr Ben Seddon undertook his PhD with Prof Don Mason at the former MRC's Cellular Immunology Unit, at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford University.
There he studied the role and mechanisms of regulatory T cells in the control of autoimmunity in rats.
He then moved to the MRCs National Institute for Medical Research where he worked first as a post-doc with Dr Rose Zamoyska in the Division of Molecular Immunology,
and then started his independent research group as a Programme Leader in the Division of Immune Cell Biology.
He has had 10 years at NIMR establishing a research programme investigating the mechanisms of T cell homeostasis, generating novel genetic models of TCR and
cytokine signalling, employing mathematical approaches to gain systems level understanding and identifying novel roles for inflammatory signalling
for T cell maturation.
In 2013, he relocated the lab to the Institute of Immunity and Transplantation at the Royal Free Hospital Campus of University College London, where he is investigating the role of TNFSFR signalling and NF-kappaB transcription factors in the maturation and function of T cells in health and disease.
EDUCATION/TRAINING:
B.S.- Pharmacy - North Gujarat University
M.S.-Pharmacology - Northeastern University
Ph.D.- Pharmacology - Northeastern University
Anne Cooke began her academic career as a postdoctoral fellow. From 1970 to 1972, she held a SRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Sussex. From 1972 to 1973, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois and worked at the Medical Center, Chicago, USA. From 1973 to 1978, she held a Arthritis Research UK postdoctoral research fellowship in the Immunology Department of Middlesex Hospital. Then from 1978 to 1981, while remaining at Middlesex Hospital, she was a Wellcome Trust senior research fellow.
In 1981, she moved from research into teaching and research.
From 1981 to 1988, she was a Wellcome Trust senior lecturer within the immunology division of the UCL Medical School and also at the Middlesex Hospital Medical
School.
From 1988 to 1990, she was Reader in Experimental Immunology at University College London.
In 1990, Anne moved to the University of Cambridge.
From 1990 to 1996, she was a lecturer in the Department of Pathology.
In 1992, she was elected a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.
From 1996 to 2000, she was Reader in Immunology.
In 1999, she was a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.
On 1 October 2000,
she was granted a personal chair and appointed Professor of Immunobiology.
In 2013,
she retired from full-time academia; she was appointed Professor Emeritus and made an Emeritus Fellow of King's College.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Cooke
BSc (Hons) Biochemistry, University of Glasgow
DPhil Biochemistry, University of Sussex.
SRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dept Biochemistry, U. Sussex.
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Illinois at the Medical Center, Chicago,USA.
ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Immunology Department, Middlesex Hospital Medical School.
Honorary Lecturer, Dept Biochemistry, St Mary's Hospital Medical School.
Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, Immunology Department, Middlesex Hospital Medical School.
Wellcome Trust Senior Lecturer, Immunology Division, University College and Middlesex Schools of Medicine.
Reader in Experimental Immunology University College, London
Lecturer, Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge.
Reader in Immunology, Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge.
Professor of Immunobiology, Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge.
Honorary Fellow, University College, London.
Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
Honorary Degree University of Copenhagen
On the first floor of this Westminster venue is the most impressive and largest function space within the building. The Great Hall a conference room of over 370 square meters and over 13 meters in height is adorned with marbled columned walls, ornate gold leaf and embellished plaster. An oak floor complements a stunning painted ceiling and two large crystal chandeliers at either end of the event room. There are seven floor-to-ceiling windows along the West wall letting in a lot of natural daylight and allowing for passers-by to gaze up and marvel at the magnificent ceiling and chandeliers.
The room was conceived as part of the building’s initial plans in 1904. The Civil Engineers wanted to create a large hall similar to the grand meeting rooms found at the Inns of Court in the City and to be comparable to impressive rooms such as Lincoln’s Inn. The painted ceiling and chandeliers were donated by a former president of the Institution of Civil Engineers as a reminder of the role the Institution and its members played during the First World War.
Many notable and historic special events take place in the Great Hall these include: the signing of the charter establishing UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1945 and His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh sat in the room to take his Royal Navy examinations. Feature films including, Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason in 2004 and Starter for 10 in 2006 filmed scenes within the four walls. More recently the Great Hall has been used as a communications room for international journalists when the venue housed the London Media Centre for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. By way of providing a unique backdrop during recent London fashion weeks the following fashion houses showcased their seasonal collections here; L’Wren Scott 2013, Alice Temperly 2012, and Antonio Berardi 2010.
Dr Eliana Lacerda MD MSc PhD
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Eliana-Lacerda/699365244Professor Eleanor Riley BSc BVSc PhD FSB FMedSci
Eleanor Riley graduated from Bristol University with degrees in Cellular Pathology and Veterinary Science. After an internship in Veterinary Pathology at Cornell University (USA) she studied for a PhD in immunology and parasitology in the Department of Veterinary Pathology at the University of Liverpool. She began working on the immunology of malaria in 1985, as a member of the senior scientific staff at the Medical Research Council Laboratories in The Gambia, West Africa. In 1990, Eleanor moved to the University of Edinburgh as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. Eleanor moved to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in October 1998 where she is Professor of Infectious Disease Immunology. Eleanor is currently Chair of the BBSRC Bioscience for Health Strategy Advisory Panel and Deputy Chair of the MRC Infections and Immunity Board.Dr Mike Murphy
EDUCATION & EMPLOYMENT1980-1984 BA in Chemistry, first class honours, first in class, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
1984-1987 PhD, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, UK
1988 Associate Research Scientist, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York
1989 Teacher with Voluntary Services Overseas (London) in Zimbabwe
1990-1992 Lecturer, Biochemistry Department, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
1992-2001 Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor, Biochemistry Department, University of Otago, New Zealand
1999 Sabbatical Visitor, Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland
1999 Sabbatical Visitor, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
2000-2001 Associate Dean for Research, Otago School of Medical Sciences
2001-present Programme Leader, MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, Cambridge, UK AWARDS & HONOURS 1982 C Walter Jones Prize in Organic Chemistry
1982-1987 Foundation Scholarship
1984 Cocker Medal for Experimental Chemistry
1984-1987 Open Research Studentship, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge
2000 Applied Biosystems Medal, NZ Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
2000 Research Medal of the New Zealand Association of Scientists
2001-present Honorary Fellow, Depts of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Otago
2008 The Nathan O. Kaplan Lecturer, University of California, San Diego
2012 Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (Hon FRSNZ)
2016 Keilin Memorial Lecture and Medal EDITORIAL BOARDS
2003-present Biochemical Journal: Deputy chair (2007-), Editorial board (2003-)
1999-2014 Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics: Editorial board
2009-2011 Current Opinion in Investigational New Drugs: Editorial board
2012-present Free Radical Biology and Medicine: Editorial board
2002-present FEBS Journal: Editorial advisory panel
2013-present Redox Biology: Editorial board
2013-present Redox Report: Editorial board
2010-present Free Radical Research: Editorial board
2003–2007 Biochemical Society Theme Panel III (Bioenergetics and Metabolism)
2001-present Scientific Advisory Board, Antipodean Pharmaceuticals, Auckland and San Francisco
2010-2013 Telethon Italy, Scientific Committee
2009-2011 Buck Institute for Aging Research, external advisory board for the U54 Interdisciplinary Research Center
PATENTS
Mitochondrially targeted antioxidants, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J. Smith, United States Patent US 6,331,532.
Mitochondrially targeted antioxidants, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J. Smith, United States Patent US 6,984,636.
Mitochondrially targeted antioxidants, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J. Smith, Australian Patent AU 763179.
Mitochondrially targeted antioxidants, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J. Smith, New Zealand Patent NZ 505352.
Mitochondrially targeted antioxidants, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J. Smith, United States Patent US 7,109,189.
Mitochondrially targeted antioxidants, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J. Smith, New Zealand Patent NZ 538371.
Triphenylphosphonium thionitrite nitric oxide donors, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J. Smith European Patent EP2066680.
Triphenylphosphonium thionitrite nitric oxide donors, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J. Smith. Canadian Patent CA 2664744.
Triphenylphosphonium thionitrite nitric oxide donors, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J. Smith. United States Patent US 12/732,909.
Mitoquinone derivatives used as mitochondrially targeted antioxidants, Michael P. Murphy and Robin A. J Smith, United States patent US 7,888,334.
Mitochondrially targeted antioxidants, Michael P Murphy and Robin A. J Smith, Canadian Patent CA 2311318
Fane Mensah
Dr Travis Craddock
Travis Craddock, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Psychology, Computer Science and Medicine applying systems biology and biophysics methods towards the purpose of identifying novel treatments for complex chronic illness involving neuroinflammation. His postdoctoral work was conducted under the supervision of Gordon Broderick, Ph.D., in the Broderick Laboratory for Clinical Systems Biology in the Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. His work with Gordon Broderick, Ph.D., focused on using a theory driven systems biology approach to investigate neuroendocrine-immune interaction dynamics in neuroinflammation and its relation complex diseases such as Gulf War Illness, and chronic fatigue syndrome. This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.
He received his BSc. in co-op physics from the University of Guelph and went on to finish a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in the field of biophysics at the University of Alberta under the supervision of Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D. His graduate research activities focused on subneural biomolecular information processing, and nanoscale neuroscience descriptions of memory, consciousness and cognitive dysfunction in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr Chris Armstrong
Dr Ingrid Gurvin Rekeland
Dr Lubov Nathanson
Professor Ola Didrik Saugstad is a Norwegian pediatrician and neonatologist noted for his research on resuscitation of newborn children and his contribution to reduce child mortality.[2] Since 1991, he has been Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Oslo and Director of the Department of Pediatric Research at Oslo University Hospital, Rikshospitalet
Saugstad received the 2012 Nordic Medical Prize, is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and became a Knight First Class of the Order of St. Olav in 2010.
Dr Asgeir Lande
Dr Katarina Lien graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo in 2000. I have clinical experience from primary care and psychiatry, and started working at the CFS/ME Centre at Oslo University Hospital in 2011.
She is particularly interested in pathophysiological mechanisms in chronic diseases.
In 2012 she received funding from The Norwegian Directorate of Health and The National Advisory Unit on CFS/ME, in order to gain experience on the use of CPET in patients with CFS/ME.
Currently, she is holding a research grant from the Norwegian ExtraFoundation for Health and Rehabilitation for the Ph.D. project “Cardiopulmonary exercise testing in patients with CFS/ME”.
She has been involved in the planning and implementation of the Rituximab trial RituxME, and is the local Principal Investigator at the CFS/ME Centre, Oslo University Hospital.
She is also engaged in CFS/ME patient education and information, and is a member of the Norwegian ME Association Scientific Advisory Board.
Professor Warren Tate from University of Otago in New Zealand - is an internationally respected biochemist, winner of the Royal Society of New Zealand's top science honour - the 2010 Rutherford Medal, and was also named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. His honour citation noted that Professor Tate was a molecular biologist, whose research had "revolutionised understanding" of how proteins were synthesised in living cells. His research had shown how proteins contributed to memory formation and neurological disease, and had important implications for HIV, Alzheimer's and chronic fatigue syndrome. Professor Tate is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry. He has been a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, and an International Research Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of the United States.