Research into Acute and Chronic Lyme Disease

Despite the fact that Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States, with more than 400,000 new cases every year, there are no consistently accurate tests for Lyme. Known in the medical community as “the great imitator,” Lyme disease can be challenging to diagnose as many of its symptoms, such as fatigue, disrupted sleep, brain fog, and joint and body pain, also occur with other diseases. As a result, Lyme victims are frequently misdiagnosed and researchers still don’t understand why 10-20 percent of Lyme patients remain sick, enduring painful and disabling symptoms long after diagnosis and antibiotic therapy. According to estimates from the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, more than 1 million people still suffer the effects of Lyme disease after initial antibiotic treatment.

One San Francisco Bay Area family decided to make a search for a cure for chronic Lyme disease their personal mission after all four members of their family tested positive for Lyme and co-infection diseases. Aiming to prevent others from enduring a similarly painful chronic health trauma and to shed light on the complex disease and encourage further investment in research, Emily and Malcolm Fairbairn have made a $2.14 million gift to the MIT School of Engineering to fund a two-year research project examining a physiomimetic analysis of acute and chronic Lyme disease.

The project will combine four independent research groups at MIT and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. The team will focus on how the immune system responds to Borrelia infection and Borrelia-directed therapeutics in a human tissue context. Lyme infection fundamentally alters immune system networks in some infected patients, which leads to lasting inflammation. This reprogramming may be different in men and women, corresponding to emerging evidence for differences in both innate and adaptive immune systems as a function of sex. While much has been learned from analysis of patient samples and standard cell cultures, research thus far has not captured dynamic, recursive interactions between Borrelia and the human immune system, especially as a function of sex and various environmental factors such as nutrition and treatment with antibiotics. A holistic approach combining serology analysis of patient systems combined with hypothesis testing and complex immune competent 3D tissue models is needed to move the field forward.