Lyme Disease is an elusive enemy. It can cause painful inflammation and debilitation in some people, and it’s difficult to diagnose. But a lab at Virginia Tech is making progress on potential treatments for a disease that many doctors once thought didn’t even exist.
"I think in general, physicians are now becoming very aware that yes, Lyme disease is real,” says Brendan Jutras, who is affiliated with the new Infectious Disease Center at Virginia Tech.
"Yes, it's, it's spreading, and it has become more common in areas that it was never common in before."
Jutras and his team work on the bacteria that causes the disease. But what they discovered is that it’s not actually the bacteria, but instead another molecule that determines whether you would easily clear the infection or come down with symptoms if you got bitten by a tick carrying the bacterium.
Will you get symptoms? Or would you never know you were bitten? Well, it depends.
“We know that human genetics are a factor. So, how you respond and in your immune system, any genetic abnormalities that you may have---just basically ‘polymorphisms’ or differences from, the average person in the population.” Those unique genetics could be “good and they can be bad. They might be good in some diseases and bad and other diseases.”
This begins to explain the some of the early confusion over whether a person has been infected with Lyme Disease. The diagnosis for Lyme disease is not an easy one to make. We’ve known about Lyme disease for only the past few decades.
Jutras says, “The bacteria that causes Lyme disease is actually kind of a stealth pathogen.”
That’s why a person who gets bitten by a tick harboring the pathogen, doesn’t always show symptoms, or it may take a long time for them to present.
And that’s one reason why a Lyme disease diagnosis is difficult to confirm.
“We're very excited about the diagnostics that we're currently working on.”
Lyme disease is one of “the only bacterial infections that I know of, that we have to rely on an indirect test that can take weeks for it to be actually be positive.”
Not like getting a diagnosis of strep throat or another common infection. With Lyme disease, it’s not that simple.
“Some people may not have a very robust immune response. Maybe they were infected, but that was months or years ago. So, they still have some lingering antibodies hanging around, but that doesn't tell us about an active infection.”
But the lab is working on something showing promise for directly detect Lyme Disease. They are looking at the way people’s personal genetics react to the infection. And this calls for specialized machine that has only now become widely available due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Jutras sees this as a lucky co-incidence that now, all over the country, these clinical labs have this one particular machine that our assay is critical for. So, so it may actually be much more accessible than we originally anticipated. These machines are now everywhere, which helps the accessibility of our tests once.
Lyme disease is becoming more widespread and infects more people in temperate regions like the U.S. than it does in drier, colder climates. As winters here get warmer and wetter, they create the ideal habitat for ticks that harbor the bacteria that causes Lyme Disease.
“And so I think that education and public awareness is really pushing this problem more towards accepting that there is an issue and, and that we need solutions and we need them fast.”
People who become infected and who manifest the disease show symptoms similar to arthritis.
The CDC estimates there are 300.000 new cases of Lyme Disease.
***Editor's Note: Radio IQ is a service of Virginia Tech
