Community Symposium on the Molecular Basis of ME/CFS - 2017

The Community Symposium on the Molecular Basis of ME/CFS - 2017 at Stanford University was sponsored by the Open Medicine Foundation (OMF) on Saturday, August 12, 2017. The symposium was live-streamed to allow for wide patient attendance.

Speakers

• Linda Tannenbaum, CEO, OMF -Welcome
• Ashley Haugen, Event Organizer - Symposium Logistics
• Ronald W. Davis, PhD, Stanford University - Opening Remarks
• Robert K. Naviaux, MD, PhD, University of California, San Diego - Keynote Speech: The metabolism of the cell danger response, healing, and ME/CFS
• Chris Armstrong, University of Melbourne - ME, metabolism and I
• Jonas Bergquist, MD, PhD, Uppsala University - In search of biomarkers revealing pathophysiology in a Swedish ME/CFS patient cohort
• Maureen Hanson, PhD, Cornell University - Probing metabolism in ME/CFS
• Neil McGregor, MDSc, PhD, University of Melbourne - Genome-wide analysis & metabolome changes in ME/CFS
• Alan Light, PhD, University of Utah - Gene variants, mitochondria & autoimmunity in ME/CFS
• Baldomero Olivera, PhD, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of Utah - A novel source of drugs: the biodiversity of oceans
• Mario Capecchi, PhD, Nobel Laureate, University of Utah - The role of microglia in neuropsychiatric disorders
• Mark Davis, PhD, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University - Is CFS/ME an autoimmune disease?
• Alain Moreau, PhD, University of Montreal - New research strategies for decoding ME/CFS to improve diagnosis and treatment
• Wenzhong Xiao, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School - Big data analysis of patient studies of ME/CFS
• Ronald W. Davis, Stanford University - Establishing new mechanistic and diagnostic paradigms for ME/CFS
• Linda Tannenbaum, OMF, CEO and Ronald W. Davis, Stanford University = Closing Remarks

Events handsouts

• Symposium Handouts

Recordings

• Video of Symposium
• DVD

Learn more

• Symposium report by Raeka Aiyar, Ph.D. on storify
• "At symposium, researchers and patients examine molecular basis of chronic fatigue syndrome" by Raeka Aiyar in Scope

genome an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes

microglia A type of immune cell, called a macrophage, that lives in the brain. For historical reasons, macrophages have different names based on the part of the body that they normally live in. Macrophages that normally live in the blood are called monocytes. Macrophages that normally live in the skin are called Langerhans cells. Macrophages that normally live in the liver are called Kupffer cells. And macrophages that normally live in the central nervous system are called microglia. Microglia were originally classified as glial cells, under the assumption that the cells had a merely structural function, before it was realized that the cells were in fact immune cells. As the "sentinel cells" of the central nervous system, microglia survey their environment for abnormalities such as infection or tissue damage, and then initiate an immune response to fight the infection or repair the tissue damage.