Stanford University's Ron Davis has become focused on helping people with myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), CNN reports. It writes that the work is personal for him, as his son has a severe form of the condition and needs the care of Davis and his wife, Janet Dafoe.
"It has turned my life upside down in many respects. I decided to terminate everything I was working on before Whitney got sick," Davis tells CNN. "Everything is ME/CFS now. It's an emergency kind of effort."
The Open Medicine Foundation — Davis directs its scientific advisory board — committed $1.2 million toward a ME/CFS Collaborative Research Center at Stanford in 2017, as GenomeWeb reported at the time. CNN adds that OMF has raised $18 million to study the disease. It further notes that Davis and his colleagues are analyzing blood from Davis' son and other patients using a nanoneedle they developed. They hope, it says, to tease out a biomarker for the disease, which they say would help the condition be better recognized and help drug companies develop treatments.