PrecisionLife's study identifies drug repurposing opportunities for treating ME and long COVID
Myalgic encephalomyelitis study identifies over 250 core genes, shared biology with long COVID, and dozens of drug repurposing opportunities
10 Dec 2025
PrecisionLife has announced new findings from the most detailed genetic analysis of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME, also known as ME/CFS) ever conducted. The analysis revealed more than 250 core genes associated with the disease, including 76 genes linked with long COVID, and uncovered dozens of drug repurposing opportunities supported by genetic biomarker tests, offering potential for faster and lower-risk routes to developing targeted treatments.
The study1, now available as a pre-print and submitted for peer review, applied PrecisionLife's AI-led combinatorial analytics platform to analyze genomic data from two DecodeME cohorts together with UK Biobank to confirm reproducibility of results across three independent datasets.
The analysis identified 7,555 genetic variants that were consistently associated with increased disease risk in three different populations.
These results confirm that ME is a deeply polygenic and biologically heterogeneous condition with at least four major disease mechanisms implicated by genetic signals: neurological dysregulation, inflammation, cellular stress response, and calcium signaling.
The findings have important implications for the future of ME research and treatment. They reinforce the need for a stratified approach, with genetic evidence pointing to multiple biological subgroups within the disease. This means that future clinical trials are likely to be more successful when they target specific patient subtypes rather than treating ME as a single, uniform condition.
This also aligns closely with the lived experience of many people in the ME community, who have long recognized the diversity of symptoms and disease patterns.
The study also demonstrated a strong genetic overlap between ME and long COVID, with 76 of 180 genes previously linked to long COVID also significantly associated with ME in the DecodeME dataset. This indicates that ME and long COVID are overlapping but different conditions, where their shared biological pathways offer promising potential for developing drug therapies that could successfully treat patients with either condition.
To support global research efforts, PrecisionLife has published the full list of SNPs and genes identified in this analysis, enabling academic groups, clinicians, and biopharma researchers to accelerate drug repurposing studies, target discovery, and development of new mechanism-based therapies.
Dr Steve Gardner, CEO of PrecisionLife, said, "These results reinforce that ME has a clear biological and genetic basis and is a complex multisystemic disease. ME is highly polygenic and heterogeneous, so no single drug will help everyone. Stratifying patients by the mechanisms that are driving their disease will be essential for predicting who will benefit from which therapies and for developing accurate diagnostic tests."
"We’re beginning to have this level of insight, and we hope that in the future the genetic biomarkers we’ve identified for existing and new drug repurposing candidates could help make trials with collaborators worldwide more successful," he added.
The research forms part of the LOCOME (LOng COvid and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) program, led by PrecisionLife and funded in part by Innovate UK. The LOCOME program was delivered in collaboration with Action for ME and the University of Edinburgh.
References
1. Sardell, J., Das, S., Pearson, M., Kolobkov, D., et al. Identification of Novel Reproducible Combinatorial Genetic Risk Factors for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis in the DecodeME Patient Cohort and Commonalities with Long COVID. December 2025. doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.01.25341362