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1) 🇪🇺 Good news! The European Union has awarded € 7.5 million for a big ME/CFS consortium that will study biological mechanisms in hundreds of patients. This is a major milestone for ME/CFS research in Europe.

2) The project is called DISCOVER-ME. It's led by Eva Untersmayr at the Medical University of Vienna and includes more than 20 partners across Europe. The European ME Alliance (EMEA) is involved as patient representatives. The grant runs for 4 years, until 2030.

3) The project will investigate biomarkers across (epi)genetic, immune, metabolic, neuroendocrine, and vascular domains. It will phenotype 2,000 patients and perform multi-omics profiling on more than 900 samples from five different European biobanks.

4) It's unclear what specific tests and analyses they will do, but the large sample size will certainly help to identify smaller effects and subgroups of patients. The project also mentions "AI-assisted stratification" and "in silico testing of therapeutic hypotheses"

5) The project is funded through the Horizon Europe program, which is highly competitive. More than 90% of applications usually fail. It's great to see that ME/CFS research managed to make this important step forward. Hope it will be the start of more and bigger collaborations.