Message from microbediscovery! We have TWO MONTHS TO GO!
Get your donations in - why not take on our $5 challenge to register your support for the researchers and Columbia University or give whatever you can afford. Having great researchers involved in the field of ME/CFS is all too rare. The work these researchers are doing is very exciting, they know how to do research that stands up to critique and they have excellent research backgrounds. What they are doing right now and want to do has the ability to move things forward and we need to encourage them and keep them going!
With respect to Drs Lipkin and Hornig, if we ever wanted researchers to investigate, be detectives or think outside the box in this illness, we finally have it! They may well find information and clues that could explain key things about symptoms, why people feel they way they do and what is going wrong in the body! With private funding they are working through projects right now on the metabolome, proteome, further pathogen searches in white blood cells, gene expression studies and functional immunology with the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. This is a large body of work and a serious programme of study into ME/CFS.
They don't have the funding they need for their microbiome work.
There is some hype around microbiome - however in the context of this research and the symptoms people experience we need to get this research on the go! Taking into account what we already know about ME/CFS and what is being found in the gut microbiome in other illnesess -- considering what is known now about gut brain axis action, the relationships that are being found with the gut and immune system and the gut and metabolism, it is very clear our gut microbiome needs thoroughly looked into!
Metabolomics is the study of small chemicals in tissue or the blood. These include molecules such as amino acids and hormones. The blood metabolome includes many molecules made by the gut microbiome, as a lot of small molecules cross the gut wall to the blood. Dr Lipkin has stated about the gut microbiome, “I think it produces compounds which traffic through the body or into the brain and cause all sorts of curious diseases”.
He has stated that "infection can lead to changes in the microbiome, which could influence the illness and that the microbiome also has the capacity to turn on and turn off the immune system. So the microbiome could be playing a role in CFS/ME in several different ways."
Our sincere thanks to everyone that has contributed and supported so far!
Donate here:
https://giving.columbia.edu/giveonline/?schoolstyle=5881&alloc=21677
Here is our $5 challenge:
http://www.microbediscovery.org/blo...ages-support-dr-lipkin-microbiome-team-9-nov/
Read about the research here:
www.microbediscovery.org
