Warrayat, Aseel, Ali, Ayah, Waked, Joulin et al. · Trends in molecular medicine · 2025 · DOI
This review article examines whether a drug called salubrinal might help people with ME/CFS and long-COVID. The researchers explain that both conditions involve stress inside cells that may contribute to symptoms. Salubrinal works by reducing this cellular stress, which could potentially help patients feel better. The authors call for more research and clinical trials to test whether this approach actually works in people.
ME/CFS and long-COVID patients lack approved treatments, making mechanistic reviews that identify novel drug candidates valuable for guiding future research. Understanding potential cellular mechanisms shared between these conditions could accelerate development of therapies targeting the root causes rather than just symptoms. This work highlights ER stress as a potentially modifiable pathway worth investigating in clinical trials.
This review does not prove that salubrinal is effective in ME/CFS or long-COVID patients, as it contains no clinical trial data or patient outcomes. It does not establish that ER stress is definitively the primary cause of these conditions, only that it may contribute. The theoretical connection between salubrinal's mechanism and symptom improvement remains unvalidated by human studies.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
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