Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to support research and funding for treatments for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.

The Government is committed to funding high-quality research to understand the causes, consequences, and treatment of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Medical Research Council (MRC), which is part of UK Research and Innovation, are working together to address the actions for research outlined in the ME/CFS Final Delivery Plan. Two projects have recently received funding to investigate the feasibility of a new clinical trial that tests multiple interventions for the treatment of post-acute infection syndromes, including Long Covid and ME/CFS. In addition, £4.75 million of Government funding has been provided to SequenceME, which will create the first high-resolution genetic map of the condition, paving the way to future diagnostics and treatments. To support research capacity building, the MRC has provided £845,000 to researchers at the University of Edinburgh towards PRIME, a new partnership award that aims to build infrastructure to enable ME/CFS biomedical research, and support is available to researchers to develop competitive funding applications from the NIHR’s Research Support Service.