The Heart of the Matter
- General practitioners (GPs) often trial different treatments with their ME/CFS and Long COVID patients.
- In partnership with GPs, by studying the outcomes of each treatment, the patient’s lived experience, and the personal history of the patient, the Personalized Treatment Trials project is looking to understand why someone may or may not respond to treatment.
- Advancing our understanding of personal response to treatment may help GPs accelerate the time to finding each patient an effective treatment, moving away from the traditional trial-and-error practices.
Personalized Treatment Trials in Australia
Retrieving clinical and biological data from patients before and after treatments will highlight the impact of that treatment. The data collected before the treatment will be mined for signatures that coincide with a treatment being successful or unsuccessful. By tracking a large number of patients across multiple treatments, the team will look to develop a predictive tool that can estimate the treatments that might have the most impact for a new patient based on data collected before the treatment begins.
There are many treatments available for symptoms but each patient is helped by a different combination. While this isn’t curative, it can be useful in improving life quality. However, the journey of each patient to find that right balance of treatments to improve their life quality can be very long and overwhelming. Furthermore, patients change over time and so does their benefit from certain treatments. The Melbourne ME/CFS Collaboration wants to harness the data of the treatment journey from many patients to benefit all patients.
Watch the video below to hear more about this study from Chris Armstrong, PhD, Director of the Melbourne ME/CFS Collaboration.
Do you want to help speed up the research process?
Now you can!
Surprisingly, one of the most common challenges researchers face is the difficulty of finding participants for their research studies. That is why we created OMF StudyME: a free global participant registry to help researchers connect with people who want to participate in research studies of ME/CFS, Long COVID, and related post-infection diseases.
Since its launch, OMF StudyME has gained significant traction, with over 9,000 participants from various countries worldwide signing up within the first year alone.
You have the power to help researchers to find answers for ME/CFS and Long COVID. Signing up is easy and takes less than five minutes.
Donate your appreciated stock directly to OMF and you can receive an immediate income-tax deduction for the fair market value of the securities on the date of transfer (even if you originally paid much less for them).