SALT LAKE CITY, US and OXFORD, UK – 13 May 2024 – The leading US multi-specialty healthcare center, Metrodora Institute, and pioneering precision medicine company, PrecisionLife, announce the start of recruitment on a cohort of up to 1,000 patients into clinical trials to evaluate new diagnosis and treatment options for ME/CFS, Long Covid, and related disorders. The partners have developed genotypic diagnostic tests that are now being evaluated for their ability to provide clinicians with an accurate view of a patient’s risk of a specific disease. Ultimately, using the molecular profile of their underlying disease mechanisms, these tests will also be used to recruit cohorts to evaluate the effectiveness of drug repurposing candidates targeting specific disease mechanisms to improve patient outcomes.

The partnership builds on PrecisionLife’s unique insights into the mechanisms driving ME/CFS and Long Covid, Metrodora’s deep clinical and research expertise, and collaborations with leading patient charities including Action for ME and the world’s largest ME/CFS study, DecodeME. Recruitment for the trial will open for US residents in June and will be accessible through Metrodora’s research platform, Metrodora Connect (https://research.metrodora.co/).

“We’re excited to begin clinical trials on the new ME/CFS and Long Covid diagnostics at Metrodora,” said Rohit Gupta, Metrodora’s Chief Scientific Officer. “This will give patients early access to their results and will validate our approach to understanding the biological drivers of these diseases and using this to advance care for patients with some of the most debilitating, currently intractable diseases”.

The partners have also identified a number of drug repurposing candidates associated with disease modifying mechanisms in ME/CFS and Long Covid, that if proved well-tolerated and effective in the planned trials, could accelerate the approval of effective new personalized treatments for patients.
“In Metrodora we have a partner that is moving quickly with us to validate a new generation of precision diagnostics and to generate clinical proof of the disease modifying potential of key disease mechanisms,” said Steve Gardner, PrecisionLife's CEO. “With our combined disease insights, patient support and clinical expertise, we're looking to bring forward new tests for a broad range of underserved patient communities.”

“Unravelling the mechanistic causes of ME enables us to better diagnose individual patients and identify existing therapies that may be effective in treating them,” added Sonya Chowdhury, CEO of Action for ME. “We hope that actionable clinical trials like these will lead to faster, more accurate diagnosis as well as new treatment options for patients. This will in turn spur on new and much-needed research into the illnesses.”