Open Medicine Foundation (OMF) is committed to advancing research that will lead to answers for people living with ME/CFS, Long COVID, and related chronic complex diseases. In this email, we’re sharing an overview of our research portfolio—what we’re doing, why it matters, and how your support fuels every step forward.
The Heart of the Matter
- OMF’s research portfolio focuses on understanding the disease mechanism, enabling accurate diagnosis, and finding effective treatments for ME/CFS, Long COVID, and other chronic complex diseases.
- OMF is investigating the disease mechanism from a variety of angles, including molecular indications of pathology.
- To enable accurate diagnosis, OMF is conducting a large-scale biomarker study in conjunction with other projects investigating objective ways of diagnosing the disease.
- OMF has several treatment trials focused on finding effective treatments for people with ME/CFS and Long COVID, importantly, with a precision medicine perspective incorporated.
- In addition to OMF’s ongoing treatment trials, we aim to expand our clinical trial network to enable the rapid launch of new studies as soon as resources become available.
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Your gift will help us expand our clinical trial network, allowing us to test more treatments and accelerate progress for people with ME/CFS and Long COVID.
Open Medicine Foundation’s Research Portfolio
OMF’s mission is to support collaborative medical research to find effective treatments and diagnostic markers for chronic complex diseases with an initial focus on myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and Long COVID. To this end, OMF’s research portfolio consists of three pillars: understand the disease mechanism, enable accurate diagnosis, and find effective treatments.
Understanding the Disease Mechanism
A critical step towards finding effective treatments for ME/CFS and Long COVID is understanding the disease mechanism. While several hypotheses exist, there is no validated, clear picture of the underlying mechanism of the disease. Therefore, OMF is exploring this component of the field through several angles, including investigating viral triggers (as one of the common triggers of ME/CFS), probing molecular indications of pathology, and trying to gain insight from similar diseases.
Enabling Accurate Diagnosis
The lack of a diagnostic tool for ME/CFS and Long COVID is a significant burden to patients and a challenge for healthcare providers. Currently, diagnosis is symptom-based, which is subjective and often overlaps with other disorders. Various biomarkers have been proposed for ME/CFS and Long COVID, but they are often based on small studies and don’t account for clinically relevant controls. Therefore, OMF is conducting research on the molecular changes seen in ME/CFS and Long COVID, including a new large-scale biomarker study that will include disease controls and subgrouping analysis.
Finding Effective Treatments
Despite the enormous disease burden ME/CFS and Long COVID present worldwide, afflicting 275 million people, there is still no FDA-approved treatment. Therefore, finding effective therapies that can relieve people’s suffering is of critical importance.
In this area, a crucial component of OMF’s mission is a concerted effort to trial new and repurposed drugs in ME/CFS and Long COVID to find treatments that are effective and to understand which treatments are effective for which people and why. We aim to achieve that through a clinical trial network, which will facilitate the rapid launching of new clinical trials—in addition to our ongoing work—as funding and resources become available.
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