Director
EV Med Research
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
Dr John Chia graduated from UCLA School of medicine and completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai medical center in Los Angeles. After completing an infectious diseases fellowship at Bethesda naval hospital, he did research on immunopathogenesis of gram-negative sepsis for 3 years with Dr. Matthew Pollack at the Uniformed Services University of Health Science. After returning to Los Angeles, he spent two years working with Dr. David Ho on immunopathogenesis of HIV infection at the AIDS research unit of Cedars-Sinai medical center. Since 1990, he has been a practicing infectious disease specialist in Torrance, California. In 1998, his son, Andrew, developed ME/CFS after a severe viral respiratory infection, and he devoted his time to understand this illness. A number of papers have been published recently on the role of enteroviruses as the etiology of ME/CFS – an area which has been implicated as one of the causes by a number of British studies. He and his son confirmed the finding of enterovirus RNA in the blood of ME/CFS patients. By analyzing samples of stomach tissue from 165 patients with CFS, they found that 82% of patients had high levels of enteroviruses in their digestive systems, and demonstrated viral RNA and limited growth of non-cytopathic viruses in cell cultures. intraperitoneal injection of the stomach biopsy lysates resulted in infection of 70% of mice with severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome (SCID) and 2 mice died in 2 weeks. He first published a paper on the development of chronic enterovirus infections and ME/CFS in patients following acute infections. Viral persistence has been demonstrated in the stomach biopsies of ME/CFS patients. Some patients responded to antiviral drugs for SARS-CoV-2. Dr Chia's research hopefully will result in the development of drugs against enteroviruses to treat the debilitating symptoms of ME/CFS.