Caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi (and its cousin Borrelia mayonii), Lyme disease has long baffled scientists with its strangely stealthy manifestations.
With the aim of eradicating the illness altogether, Tufts has launched the pioneering Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative. The project spans numerous fields, including ecology, epidemiology, population health, genetics, and clinical intervention, and unites a multidisciplinary team of scientists who can address all aspects of the disease, from animal behavior to human health.
The goals are bold: Wipe Lyme disease out in the wild, eliminate it in humans, understand better how the Borrelia bacteria operates within the body, and find more effective treatments for patients suffering from long-haul Lyme.
Linden Hu, Chervinsky Professor of Immunology at Tufts University School of Medicine and one of the initiative’s two co-directors, said that any effort to eradicate Lyme disease has to start with ticks, the bloodsucking insects that host and transmit the Borrelia bacteria.
However, eradicating Lyme from the ecosystem is easier said than done. While the disease-causing bacteria live in ticks, ticks don’t pass it down to their offspring directly. Instead, they feed on a vertebrate host, such as a deer or a white-footed mouse, and pass the pathogen to it. When another tick feeds on that same host, it too picks up the bacterium.
Hu and his colleagues have put forth some proposals for wiping the disease out in the wild, including ones that involve vaccines and antibiotics, but these have met with bureaucratic obstacles. While they continue to search for viable ways to abolish the disease at its source, Tufts researchers also are looking into ways to prevent the disease in humans—and to more effectively treat it.
Doing so requires better understanding Borrelia. The bacteria has methods of defeating the body’s defenses and taking root in tissues; tracing how it does so could eventually help scientists develop more specialized treatments to fight it and eradicate it, said John Leong, Trilling Professor and chair of Molecular Biology and Microbiology at Tufts School of Medicine.
Such treatments are especially crucial for patients suffering from long-haul Lyme, which can lead to arthritis, carditis, and other potentially dangerous complications. Combined with techniques to disarm the pathogen’s potency and ongoing efforts to remove it from the wild, new treatments based on a deeper understanding of the bacteria could finally give scientists the upper hand on the insidious disease, and accomplish the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative’s ambitious goal to eradicate it entirely.
Pictured above: Linden Hu (right), with colleague Sam Telford, professor of infectious disease and global health at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine