Administrative Core

SUMMARY The Administrative Core will coordinate research, regulatory, and fiscal activities within the Center for Solutions for ME/CFS in this second funding cycle and facilitate interactions with the ME/CFS patient and scientific communities. It will be led by the PI, W. Ian Lipkin (Director), and Administrative Director, Diane McFadden, and collaborate with community groups as well as new scientific partners in the UK. We will expand our research team to include new partners and aims who bring complementary and unique resources to the program. In Project 1, members of the ME/CFS community and two clinician-investigators (Levine and Komaroff) who developed a smartphone app in close collaboration with Care Evolution and Solve ME will collect data and biological samples in close temporal proximity to changes in clinical status for molecular, microbiological, and biochemical analyses. Moreau of ICanCME will join, bringing expertise in microRNA biology and strengthening linkage to the Canadian ME/CFS research community. In Project 2, Christopher Ponting of the University of Edinburgh will initiate a GWAS that leverages the 25,000 ME/CFS subject DecodeME GWAS project in the United Kingdom and further strengthens these international linkages. Solve ME (Oved Amitay) and the ME/CFS community are critical partners in this effort. In Project 3, we will establish a collaboration with the US Air Force Academy (Armand Balboni) in Colorado Springs to enable access to electronic medical records and the Department of Defense Serum Repository for the first prospective population-based cohort study of environmental exposures that may trigger or exacerbate ME/CFS.