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Action for ME/Medical Research Council Research Summit Buckinghamshire November 8th and 9th 2006 |
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Dr Julia Newton has kindly submitted a brief note from this meeting to share with us. I was invited to attend a research summit organised and funded jointly by the Medical Research Council and Action for ME. Over 25 researchers from the UK attended. Funding for research to allow us to understand CFS/ME has historically been comparatively poor, so the purposes of the summit were to help us understand the MRC priorities for funding (the MRC is the major funder of research in the UK), to provide an opportunity to meet and network with other researchers interested in research in the area of CFS/ME and to allow, in a workshop session, researchers to develop potential projects for funding. Professor Colin Blakemore (Chief Executive of the MRC) was a key speaker, and provided an interesting overview of the MRC perspective. It appears that they are eager to fund CFS/ME research, and have issued a Highlight Notice to researchers requesting applications to CFS/ME. The problems in the past appear to be that the quality of the application that the MRC have received has not been considered high enough, and that they would strongly encourage high profile researchers in other clinical areas applying techniques and expertise to the study of CFS/ME. Dr Nancy Klimas from Miami, USA also presented a summary of the International perspective which focussed on understanding the biological basis of CFS/ME. In the afternoon,
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