A groundbreaking genetic study has revealed 250 genes linked to myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and 76 linked to long COVID, opening the door to targeted treatments.

The study by PrecisionLife also highlights dozens of drug repurposing opportunities backed by genetic biomarkers, offering a potential shortcut to targeted treatments.

The study leveraged PrecisionLife’s AI-driven combinatorial analytics platform to examine genomic data from two DecodeME cohorts and the UK Biobank, confirming results across three independent datasets. Researchers identified 7,555 genetic variants—including the eight recently highlighted by the DecodeME GWAS study—that consistently increased disease risk.

The findings confirm that ME is deeply polygenic and biologically diverse, with at least four major mechanisms implicated: neurological dysregulation, inflammation, cellular stress response, and calcium signalling.

“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,” said Dr Steve Gardner, CEO of PrecisionLife.

“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.”

The research also uncovered significant genetic overlap between ME and long COVID, with 76 of 180 long COVID-associated genes also linked to ME. This shared biology suggests potential pathways for therapies that could benefit both patient groups.

Sonya Chowdhury, CEO of Action for ME, said: “These findings offer further hope to people with ME around the world. For decades, people affected by ME have lacked recognition, access to proper diagnosis and effective treatments. PrecisionLife’s results represent a major step forward in understanding the biology of the disease and provide real opportunities for targeted therapies to move into clinical testing. We are proud that DecodeME has helped pave the way for this progress, and we will continue to champion research that delivers meaningful benefits for the community.”

Prof Chris Ponting, Chair of Medical Bioinformatics at the University of Edinburgh and a DecodeME investigator, added: “DecodeME was designed to reveal the complex genetics of ME by providing a dataset of the scale and quality required for robust discovery. PrecisionLife has shown how making such datasets available can quickly generate new insights into ME disease biology. This is an exciting outcome of making consented DecodeME data available to research partners and we look forward to enabling further future collaborations.”

Patient advocate Helen Baxter said: “These results greatly enhance our understanding of the biology of ME and present opportunities for drug repurposing which affords hope to the millions of people living with ME and long COVID around the world.”

The study is part of the LOCOME (LOng COvid and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) program, led by PrecisionLife and partly funded by Innovate UK, in collaboration with Action for ME and the University of Edinburgh.

ME and long COVID collectively affect an estimated 400 million people worldwide. The lack of diagnostic tools and effective treatments has left decades of unmet need—a gap this research aims to begin closing.