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1) 🇺🇸 The Research team of Nancy Klimas in Florida has received a $ 3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their study will investigate whether exposure to toxic mold affects symptom severity and the immune system in ME/CFS patients.

2) The principal investigator is Lubov Nathanson, associate professor at Nova Southeastern University. The project runs until 2031 and will collect biological samples from 200 study participants (150 ME/CFS patients and 50 controls) and measure their exposure to mycotoxins.

3) The NIH page gives some more info about the goals of the project. The authors write: "We hypothesize that mycotoxins induce transcriptomic reprogramming in immune cells and extracellular vesicles (EVs), leading to immune exhaustion and chronic inflammation."

4) They plan to measure urinary mycotoxins and use single-cell RNA sequencing to define mycotoxin contribution to transcriptomic alterations in blood cell subsets in ME/CFS patients.

5) The study will also integrate multi-omics data with machine learning to identify correlations between mycotoxin exposure, immune dysregulation, and symptom severity.

6) Another part of the project will look at long and small RNA signatures in extracellular vesicles that are associated with mycotoxin exposure.

7) To be honest, this topic wouldn't be my research priority for ME/CFS, but it's still good news that this is being investigated and that researchers were able to obtain NIH funding for it.