Our biggest weapon in the battle against chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has to be the almost dizzying emergence of new technologies being developed. ME/CFS may not have much money, but somehow it’s attracted several pioneers in the medical technology field.

Ian Lipkin (Columbia), Ron Davis (Stanford), Gordon Broderick (Rochester), and Travis Craddock (Nova Southeastern) aren’t just using the latest technologies – they’re actually creating them. Lipkin, the Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University, and a longtime Simmaron Research Foundation collaborator, is internationally known for his ability to create new molecular diagnostic techniques.

Lipkin developed MassTag-PCR, the GreeneChip system, and was the first to use next generation sequencing technology to identify pathogens. The 1,500 or so pathogens Lipkin identified include the West Nile Virus, numerous tick-borne agents, Lujo virus, MERS-CoV, and Tilapia Lake Virus to name a few. He also played a critical role in battling the SARS epidemic in China.

Lipkin, who has worked with Dr. Dan Peterson for many years, has a long collaborative research history with ME/CFS. Since September 2017, Lipkin has been the Director for the Center for Solutions for ME/CFS (CfS for ME/CFS) at Columbia University funded by the NIH.

Mystery Disease Strikes Children

Lipkin made news recently with his discovery of the apparent cause of a puzzling and devastating disease mostly affecting children called acute flaccid myelitis (AFM). The way the disease develops bears some interesting similarities with ME/CFS.

Several striking bits of evidence suggest a pathogen might be involved. The bug is not new – it first showed up in 1962 – and usually causes nothing more than a respiratory infection – but in rare cases (600 cases in the U.S. since 2014) it can be devastating.

A spike in AFM incidence in the U.S. in 2014 suggested a virus might have become more prominent. The fact that most infections appear during late summer and fall as pathogens start to sweep the U.S., plus a CDC report which indicated that the disease almost always followed a respiratory infection, turned a big spotlight on pathogens.

Lastly, symptom onset was abrupt and the disease produced polio-like symptoms such as difficulty moving the eyes, drooping eyelids, facial droop, facial weakness, difficulty swallowing, slurred speech, sudden arm or leg weakness (paralysis). The difficulty breathing that caused some children to be placed on ventilators brought back memories of the iron lung which kept people with polio alive in the early 20th century.

With that the hunt was on for an enterovirus – the cause of polio and a sometimes conjectured cause of ME/CFS. Although attempts to snag the intruder in the cerebral spinal fluid proved fruitless, it wasn’t for lack of trying. The CDC created a task force (which included Avindra Nath, the lead investigator of the NIH intramural study on ME/CFS) and embarked on a cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) study that included over 500 people.

Lipkin Tries New Tack

Lipkin proposed a low viral load, a hit and run virus, and technical issues might be bollixing up the PCR search in AFM, and turned to a much more powerful new technology developed by his team called VirCapSeq-VERT, as well as the use of peptide arrays that looked for immunological responses to pathogens. (VirCapSeq-VERT with its ability to detect novel and mutated viruses is like PCR on steroids.)

The peptide arrays proved the trick. Lipkin found antibodies to EV peptides present in almost 80% of the study participants’ CSF, and zeroed in on a specific enterovirus called EV-D68. Since then a separate study has confirmed his finding. Now some researchers are calling acute flaccid myelitis “the new polio“.

Lipkin on Acute Flaccid Myelitis

ME/CFS Next

The question now is whether Lipkin can do the same thing for ME/CFS. A VirScan analysis funded by Solve ME failed to produce results; however, that method may not have had the specificity needed to find the footprints of an infectious agent. Lipkin and his colleague Dr. Nischay Mishra are using the same Serochip method they used to solve AFM, to begin an intensive search for an immunological response to a pathogen (viruses, bacteria, endogenous retroviruses, fungi) in ME/CFS.

The Serochip will scan through up to 6 million peptides (small amino acid chains) in an attempt to uncover a hidden pathogen that has been, or still is, tweaking ME/CFS patients’ immune systems. The work could also uncover an autoimmune reaction.

ME/CFS with its multiple subsets is likely far more complex than AFM, but if Lipkin can find a distinct immune signature or more likely distinct immune signatures in ME/CFS, he might be able to break another mysterious, pathogen triggered disease wide open.

Lipkin and his team will begin testing the blood or spinal fluid of ME/CFS patients in early 2020.

Click on the stories below for a look back at Simmaron’s collaborative work with Dr. Lipkin.