ds-a-temporary-home.html
Chronic fatigue syndrome scientist finds a temporary home
December 15, 2011 | 6:15 pm | Posted by Ewen Callaway
Judy Mikovits is taking her work on the road. The embattled chronic
fatigue syndrome (CFS) researcher will conduct her arm of a US
National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID)
sponsored study on the condition=92s link to certain retroviruses at
another US government laboratory, the scientist overseeing the study
told Nature today.
W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection & Immunity at
Columbia University in New York, says that Mikovits will team up with
her former mentor Frank Ruscetti at his laboratory at the US National
Cancer Institute (NCI) in Frederick, Maryland. They are one of three
groups testing dozens of blinded blood samples from CFS patients and
healthy controls for XMRV and related retroviruses.
Mikovits had been slated to perform the study while at the
Whittemore-Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disorders (WPI) in
Reno, Nevada. But she was fired from her job in September for not
sharing a cell line with another scientist there. She was arrested in
California last month and charged in Nevada with possessing stolen lab
notebooks and other materials that belonged to WPI. She also faces a
civil suit in connection to the materials, some of which have since
been returned to WPI (read =91Embattled scientist in theft probe=92 for
more details).
Mikovits and Ruscetti collaborated on a 2009 Science paper that
suggested that CFS patients were far likelier to be infected with XMRV
than healthy people.
After numerous labs failed to find the virus, NIAID tapped Lipkin last
year to lead a multi-centre study examining the link. The =91Lipkin
study=92 involves Mikovits and Ruscetti, researchers at NIH and the US
Food and Drug Administration who identified sequences of viruses
related to XMRV in CFS patients, and a team at the US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention that has been unable to find any trace
of XMRV (for a run-down of the entire episode see our story =91Fighting
for a cause=91).
=93[WPI] are no longer involved because the whole point was to have
Mikovits try to reproduce her work, and having someone else at the
institute do so wouldn=92t address the questions,=94 Lipkin says. =93It=92s
critical that she do the work. She doesn=92t have a lab at present, so
it=92s going to be done at NCI.=94
Lipkin had initially hoped to have the study done by the end of this
year, but he now says that only about half the samples are ready to
send to researchers. He plans to meet with Ruscetti and Mikovits
tomorrow to hear their plans for conducting the study. =93We=92re going to
get through this as rapidly as we can, but make certain what we
present to people is going to be complete,=94 Lipkin says.
Lipkin says he is convinced by work from John Coffin=92s team at NCI,
showing that XMRV emerged in the 1990s as a lab contaminant and is
unlikely to underlie CFS (see Science raises questions about XMRV).
But he says those findings do not rule out the possibility that CFS
patients are infected with related retroviruses that, for some reason,
only Mikovits has been able to detect.
Lipkin came to Mikovits=92 defence in her latest troubles. He says that
she should be entitled to keep a copy of her laboratory records and
lamented her arrest. =93It=92s very, very ugly and the sooner we put all
this behind us the better off we=92re all going to be,=94 he says.
Neither Mikovits nor Ruscetti could be reached for comment, but we
will update this post if they get back to us.
Hat tip to CFS: A novel blog, which reported today that Mikovits and
Ruscetti were looking for a site to conduct their portion of the
Lipkin study.
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