A Shot Against Ticks: Scientists Work Toward Lyme Disease Immunity

Lyme disease is a condition that can feel impossible to catch as well as diagnose. Thanks to Yale School of Medicine, there are efforts to create a vaccine for humans to fight against tick borne illness as well as creating a more effective test for diagnose it.

The deer tick, also known as Ixodes scapularis, is the culprit of carrying lyme disease and other tickborne illness. According to Medicalxpress.com, "Lyme disease alone infects 500,000 Americans annually, and warmer temperatures from climate change mean tick species are expanding beyond their traditional habitats."

With a growing concern of Lyme disease specifically in North America, scientists decided it was time to figure out whether or not humans could become immune to tick antibodies. It is currently proven that animals can become immune to illness, due to antibodies that naturally create in their blood nautrally repelling ticks.

The challenge here, ticks "secrete thousands of proteins, and figuring out which the human immune system recognizes has been a research challenge."

This is when researchers created IscREAM, a "rapid extracellular antigen monitoring, a technique to detect antibody responses to more than 3000 tick antigens," according to the study. "Previous methods could only examine a handful of known proteins at a time or relied on crude mixtures of tick proteins, which left many potential targets unexplored." Humans were tested throughout this process.

To ensure that the results were correct, the scientists then tested an mRNA vaccine on guinnea pigs, which included tick proteins. The results found that the animals grew an immunity to the antigens injected.

Erol Fikrig on the study shared that this process is promising for the future, and they are hoping to develop a vaccine for humans within the next "5 to 10 years".

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