JOURNAL OF IIMER May 2026 molecular genetics of gamma-delta T cells - a field of direct relevance to immune dysfunction in ME - and faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Leeds, and the University of East Anglia. At the Quadram Institute he leads the Gut Microbes and Health research programme, one of the foremost centres for gut biology and mucosal immunology in Europe. He is co-chair of EMERG, and has been a central figure in building the international research infrastructure around ME. https://www.investinme.org/brmec15-news-the-colloquia.shtml This year’s sessions are as follows - Session 1: A Systems Biology Approach to ME Moderated by Tamas Korcsmaros, Imperial College Londo, a systems biologist at Imperial College London whose work focuses on signalling networks, multi-omics data integration and the application of network medicine to complex disease. Systems biology offers ME research something it has long needed - a way of looking at the whole picture. Rather than examining individual genes, proteins or pathways in isolation, it integrates data from across biological systems, combining computational modelling with experimental findings to reveal how the parts interact. For a disease as complex and variable as ME, this kind of joined-up approach may prove essential. Dezső Modos, also of Imperial College London, applies network biology to understand how genetic variants - particularly those in non-coding regions of the genome - drive disease at the cellular level. His iSNP platform maps how these variants affect regulatory networks, building patient-specific models of disease pathogenesis that are directly relevant to the challenge of translating ME genomic data into meaningful biological insights. Marek Ostaszewski of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine brings a different but complementary perspective. As a lead contributor to the COVID-19 Disease Map and a core member of the Disease Maps Project, his work focuses on building structured, reusable computational repositories of molecular interaction data - the kind of infrastructure that allows findings from across the ME research community to be integrated and interrogated systematically. Veronika Kedlian, a postdoctoral fellow in the Saez-Rodriguez group at EMBL-EBI, will present work on a Human Thymus Ageing Cell Atlas that defines a spatially resolved model of thymic involution. The thymus plays a central role in adaptive immune development, and its decline with age has direct implications for immune function. Kedlian will also address current known links between thymic involution, immune ageing and ME - bringing single-cell and spatial transcriptomics approaches to bear on questions that matter directly to this audience. Together, the three presentations reflect a field beginning to harness the full power of computational and systems-level science in the pursuit of ME's mechanisms. Invest in ME Research Page 23 of 35
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