Happy Holidays from everyone here at the JAX ME/CFS CRC! We believe 2018 has been a landmark year for pushing forward with advances in #MECFS research. We are very excited about the progress that has been made, and look forward to the next year for generating novel findings and collaborations with the other Centers and scientists.

We are especially thankful for the community’s unwavering participation and support of our scientific endeavors over this past year. In the first year of research at the ME/CFS Center at JAX, we have actively worked with our clinical partners at Bateman Horne Center to recruit individuals with ME/CFS and healthy controls, and to date we have collected both blood and stool samples from dozens of patients who were recruited to the study. We have processed all of these biological samples for immune profiling, microbiome, and metabolism data analysis for biomarker discovery in our labs, which has been a labor of love and passion! Our collaborations with the Cornell and Columbia ME/CFS Centers are also running at full speed. We are working on the same set of samples across the three sites and contributing our respective strengths to our studies, and we believe that this will generate the most comprehensive biological dataset to date on ME/CFS patient samples.

We are even more hopeful now that our progress will continue to accelerate into 2019 and bring many new ideas and inspiration, as well as a promise for a brighter tomorrow for all those who are suffering from this terrible disease. We wish that all of the ME/CFS community and their loved ones be blessed with laughter, peace, and love. May the magic and the wonder of the holiday season stay with you throughout the coming year, and the New Year bring you new achievements, joy, and maintain your hope, because failure is not an option!

Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!
– the JAX ME/CFS team, Derya Unutmaz, and Courtney Gunter