WE&ME Award: Unraveling Biological Differences in ME/CFS
The WE&ME Award, presented for the first time, is one of Austria’s most generously endowed privately funded research grants. The €450,000 award supports basic research into the multisystem disease ME/CFS. In a competitive selection process based on reviews by international experts, epidemiologist Matthias Wielscher and three other researchers stood out. Wielscher’s project was selected to receive the WE&ME Award and will be funded by a donation of €450,000 from the WE&ME Foundation to the alpha+ Foundation. The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has approved an additional €1.3 million in funding for three other research projects on ME/CFS.
“We are very grateful for the support from the WE&ME Foundation and the FWF. This funding gives us the opportunity to continue advancing our genetic research on ME/CFS. Our goal is to better understand genetically distinct subgroups of diseases, laying the groundwork for more precise diagnostics and future personalized treatment approaches,” said Matthias Wielscher about the WE&ME Award.
“We chose Matthias Wielscher’s project because we feel that recognizing the heterogeneity of this disease should be a key focus of current biomedical research on ME/CFS, and because the lack of patient stratification prevents consistent study results and targeted therapies. Genetic studies and correlations enable more precise subtyping with the goal of deciphering different disease mechanisms and, as a result, identifying potential targets for diagnostics and therapies. International networking and collaboration with the largest genetic dataset for ME/CFS (DecodeME) – the sequencing of which is also being funded by WE&ME – are also a key component of this project,” said Gabriele Ströck of the WE&ME Foundation about the selection of the award-winning project.
“Behind every research question about ME/CFS are people whose lives have been fundamentally changed by this serious illness. It severely restricts the wellbeing of thousands of people affected by it, while at the same time still raising many scientific questions. This makes it all the more important that with the WE&ME Award and the three other projects funded by the FWF, we are investing in excellent basic research aimed specifically at this issue. The award-winning projects are doing important groundwork to help us better understand the biological causes of the disease and develop new approaches to diagnosis and treatment. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the WE&ME Foundation for their extraordinary dedication. Together with the FWF, we are supporting research that creates real-life opportunities for people affected by this debilitating condition,” said Minister of Science Eva-Maria Holzleitner.
“These new projects demonstrate that it is possible to use private donations to the alpha+ Foundation to expand excellent basic research and, in this specific case, to improve our understanding of ME/CFS. I would like to extend my special thanks to the WE&ME Foundation for their extraordinary dedication to helping thousands of patients. Partnerships between public funding agencies and private foundations create additional opportunities to advance scientific progress where it is most urgently needed,” said FWF Vice-President and alpha+ Board Member Ursula Jakubek.
“I am very glad that two additional research projects on ME/CFS will also be conducted at the Medical University of Vienna. Partners such as the WE&ME Foundation are making an important contribution to advancing research in this field, opening up new avenues for research into a disease that we still need to understand much better,” said Markus Müller, Rector of the Medical University of Vienna.
WE&ME Award: Unraveling Biological Differences in ME/CFS
ME/CFS is a highly heterogeneous condition. Patients differ not only in their symptoms but also, most likely, in the biological mechanisms behind their condition. However, when all the individual cases are studied together, these different disease mechanisms overlap. This makes it more difficult to identify genetic causes and develop new treatment approaches.
With the WE&ME Award, Matthias Wielscher and participating researcher Kathryn Hoffmann will be investigating this heterogeneity from two different perspectives under the title “Mechanistic Endotypes in ME/CFS.” They will use their findings to identify biologically meaningful subgroups of patients.
The first approach is based on clinical data. Here, the team will be analyzing symptoms, comorbidities, treatment attempts, and questionnaire data from large patient cohorts. The goal is to identify patients who have similar disease courses or combinations of symptoms. The second approach uses genetic data – not singling out individual genes, instead combining many genetic variants into genetic mechanism scores. Each of these scores describes the genetic influence on a specific biological process, such as inflammatory responses, autoimmunity, disturbances in energy production, or the intestinal barrier. In this way, individual biological profiles are created. The researchers expect that some affected individuals will have a stronger genetic influence on inflammatory processes, while in others, genetic changes associated with autoimmunity or disorders of vascular or barrier function will predominate. These patterns will then be analyzed to identify genetically defined subgroups of ME/CFS.
A key focus of the project is comparing the two approaches. The goal is to investigate whether clinically defined and genetically defined subgroups corroborate one another, thereby enabling a better understanding of the biological diversity of ME/CFS. Finally, the team will be searching for these newly defined subgroups in the world’s largest genetic dataset for ME/CFS (DecodeME), which will allow them to conduct new genome-wide analyses. Matthias Wielscher expects these anayses to reveal genetic correlations that have remained hidden in previous analyses due to the high degree of heterogeneity. In the long term, this better understanding of the various disease mechanisms could help researchers develop more precise diagnostic methods and identify new approaches for targeted therapies or the repurposing of already approved drugs.
The project builds on the findings of previous research led by Matthias Wielscher, which was funded in 2024 by the WE&ME Foundation and the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF).
An additional €1.3 million for ME/CFS projects from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
In addition to Matthias Wielscher’s project, which is made possible by a private donation from the WE&ME Foundation to the alpha+ Foundation, three other projects were selected after the FWF review process based on their quality and innovation level: Mirjam Bachler from the Medical University of Innsbruck with the project “Individualized Treatment in ME/CFS-PAIS with PEM,” Lilian Konicar from the Medical University of Vienna with the project “INSPIRE Individualized Neurotherapy for CFS/ME - PEM,” and Katharina Ledebur from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna with the project “TRACK-PEM: Tracking and Analyzing Post-Exertional Malaise.” These three projects are receiving a total of €1.3 million in funding from the FWF.
About the WE&ME Foundation
The WE&ME Foundation (formerly TEMPI Foundation) was founded in 2020 by Gabriele and Gerhard Ströck and is based in Vienna. The Ströck family has been profoundly impacted by the devastating effects of ME/CFS, as two of their three sons suffer from the condition. This has inspired their unwavering determination to establish and support the WE&ME Foundation, which is committed to basic research in the field of ME/CFS. The WE&ME Foundation is committed to basic research in the field of ME/CFS. It aims to bring together and pool findings from research, medicine, and patient experience and create broad awareness to help achieve the necessary patient care. For further information, please see weandmecfs.org.
The WE&ME Foundation will continue its commitment to basic research in the future and will be supporting additional biomedical projects in collaboration with the WWTF. The consolidation call (€2 million), which builds on the first round, will be awarded at the end of 2026 and will open in the first quarter of 2027. The jury for the “We&Me Projects” call (totaling €2 million) also includes the perspectives of affected individuals through the “Science for ME” patient forum. This call, which opened in June 2026, is funded by the WE&ME Foundation and coordinated by the WWTF, and is aimed primarily at international researchers.
The Austrian Science Fund’s nonprofit alpha+ Foundation
With the alpha+ Foundation, the FWF was the first publicly funded research funding agency in Europe to establish a nonprofit foundation to channel philanthropy as a means of opening up additional opportunities for Austria’s researchers in basic research. The objective of the FWF’s alpha+ Foundation is to create new research grants based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals and support the careers of highly talented young researchers. Currently, private donations allow the FWF to finance research projects worth €2.5 million each year.
