Friday, December 22, 2017

The Use of Autologous T-Cell therapy in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

The technology for autologous (self-generated) EBV cell destruction development has been stable for two decades. Contemporaneously, a paper was published in Medical Hypotheses about this viability of this treatment. The main difference is the aggregation in lymph nodes, while I believe it to be more CNS-specific. 

If one views the literature, a few themes emerge:
  • EBV-CTL therapy can be effective against imminently fatal and uncontrolled illnesses, such as Stage 4 Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma
  • It is the only effective treatment for chronic active Epstein Barr Virus, which is fatal. Case reports did try Rituximab in 2000, 8 years before the CFS case report.
  • Has one of the best safety profiles I have ever seen in a drug. This is almost certainly due to the patient population.

Atara Biotherapeutics is now using allogenic (non-autologous) EBV cytotoxic cells in Phase I for MS, a study in France is completing a similar study for Lupus. 
EBV is a purposeless fatigue-causing virus safely ensconced in the CNS, and reducing it should reduce fatigue burden in select populations, notably those EBV positive. Other herpesviruses can be completed using this process, but EBV is the most stable train.

EBV has a tepid history within CFS, but the technology for detection of specific epitopes in post-viral EBV CFS has tightened and so has the criteria for inclusion in studies.

Future posts will talk about the rationale of hematopoetic and adipose mediated stem cell transplantation in CFS, as well as CFS being as a derivation of cytokinetically-inverted Multiple Sclerosis.

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