A 25 Year Follow-up of ME Patients

Dr. David Bell graduated from Harvard College and gained an MD degree at Boston University. Post doctoral training in paediatrics was completed with subspecialty training in Paediatric Behaviour and Developmental Disorders. In 1978 he began work at the University of Rochester and then began a private practice in the town of Lyndonville, New York. In 1985 nearly 220 persons became ill with an illness subsequently called chronic fatigue syndrome in the communities surrounding Lyndonville, New York. This illness cluster began a study of the illness which continues today.

Dr. David Bell is the author or co-author of numerous scientific papers on CFS, and, in 2003 was named Chairman of the Advisory Committee for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome of the Department of Health and Human Services. Publications include A Disease of A Thousand Names, (1988) and The Doctor's Guide to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, (1990). Dr. Bell is currently performing ME/CFS research into the XMRV retrovirus.

 

B-cell Depletion Therapy Using Rituximab in ME/CFS

Professor Olav Mella / Dr Øystein Fluge  

Institute of Medicine, Section of Oncology, University of Bergen, Norway

and

Department of Oncology and Medical Physics, Haukeland University Hospital,  Bergen, Norway

Øystein Fluge received medical degree in 1988 at the University of Bergen, and is a specialist in oncology since 2004. He has worked as a Research Fellow with support from the Norwegian Cancer Society and is now chief physician at the Cancer Department, Haukeland University Hospital. Doctoral work emanates from the Surgical Institute and Department of Molecular Biology, University of Bergen.

Professor Wileman is Professor of Molecular Virology and Director at the Biomedical Research Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. His previous positions in the UK have included the Head of the Department of Immunology and Pathology at the BBSRC Institute of Animal Health, Pirbright.

He was Assistant Professor at the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA where worked at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Beth Israel Hospital.  He held investigator awards from the Claudia Adam's Barr Foundation for Cancer Research, the Medical Foundation of the Charles King Trust and was Basil O'Connor Scholar of the March of Dimes Research Foundation.  Prior to that he was SERC NATO Fellow and Fellow of the Parker Francis Pulmonary Research Foundation within the Department of Cell Biology, Washington University Medical School, St Louis.

Professor Simon Carding

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.

Translational Research in ME/CFS

Dr. Andreas Kogelnik

The Institute works closely with the Open Medicine Clinic and other clinics to conduct research and apply new knowledge back into clinical practice.

Following his clinical training, he remained at Stanford with NIH funding to engage in post-doctoral research in microbiology, immunology and bioinformatics with Dr. Ellen Jo Baron and Dr. Stanley Falkow, where he explored host-response profiles in severely ill patients.

Together with Dr. José Montoya, he was instrumental in the conception, design, and execution of the EVOLVE study - a placebo-controlled, double-blind study of a subset of chronic fatigue syndrome patients with evidence of viral infection.

Dr. Kogelnik worked with Dr. Atul Butte in translational informatics to determine patterns that indicated a high risk for adverse events in paediatric patients at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital.

He is the Medical Director of the Open Medicine Clinic - a community-based research clinic focussed on chronic infectious diseases, neuroimmune disease, and immunology.  Dr. Kogelnik has published numerous scientific papers and book chapters, is an Editor of Computers in Medicine and Biology, and is a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford University. 

With the Open Medicine Institute, he has led the formation of CFS and Lyme Registries and Biobanks as well as creating an infrastructure for providers to collect better data and implement clinical trials across a network of sites.

Conference Chair

Professor Malcolm Hooper

Professor Hooper has previously chaired Invest in ME conferences and participates in The Hooper Interviews - interviews with conference speakers at the Invest in ME Conferences (see here).