A New Vaccine For Lyme Disease From Tick Saliva?
Traditionally, vaccines have directly targeted specific pathogens. This is the first time that antibodies against a protein in the saliva of a pathogen’s transmitting agent (in this case, the tick) has been shown to confer immunity when administered protectively as a vaccine.
Lyme, as we know, is transmitted by ticks. When it moves through the tick, it is coated with a tick salivary protein known as Salp15. The Yale team injected Salp15 into healthy mice and found that it significantly protected the mice from getting Lyme disease. When combined with outer surface proteins of B. burgdorferi, the protection was even greater.
Lead author Erol Fikrig, M.D. of Yale School of Medicine and Howard Hughes Medical Institute said, “The interaction between the Lyme disease agent and ticks is very complex, and the bacteria uses a tick salivary protein to facilitate infection of the mammalian host. By interfering with this important interaction, we can influence infection by the Lyme disease agent.”
Several years ago there was a Lyme vaccine on the market that utilized just the outer surface proteins of the bacteria. It was taken off the market in 2002 due to the terrible side effects for those who had already been exposed to Lyme, and to date no other antigen has been tested in phase III clinical trials.
The authors believe this new strategy of targeting the saliva - the “vector molecule” that a microbe requires to infect a host - may be applicable not just to Lyme disease but to other insect-borne pathogens that also cause human illness.
“We believe that it is likely that many arthropod-borne infection agents of medical importance use vector proteins as they move to the mammalian host,” Fikrig explained. “If so, then this paradigm, described with the Lyme disease agent, is likely to be applicable to these illnesses. Currently, we are working to determine if this strategy is likely to be important for West Nile virus infection, dengue fever, and malaria, among other diseases.”
Other researchers were Jianfeng Dai, Penghua Wang, Sarojini Adusumilli, Carmen J. Booth and Sukanya Narasimhan of Yale School of Medicine, and Juan Anguita of the University of Massachusetts. This work was support by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
It seems that we could truly be close to a powerful new Lyme vaccine.
Similar Posts:
- Lyme Disease Grant For Better Diagnosis
- Can We Use The Wisdom of Mother Nature to Stop the Wild Spread Of Lyme Disease?
- How Do Medical Doctors Breathe With Their Heads In The Sand?
- Lyme Disease and Auto-Immune Dysfunction
- Lizards For Chronic Lyme Disease
- WARNING! It’s That Time of Year…
- Lyme Disease On The Rise - Sexual Transmission?
- Who Gets The Grants For Chronic Lyme Disease?
- Chemical-Free Solution to Halt the Spread of Lyme Disease
- Bad News For Babesia and Chronic Lyme Disease
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
