BAL Spotlights Series
In this insightful conversation between Ticktective™ guest host Dana Parish and microbiologist Amy Proal, PhD, we investigate persistent pathogens, how they remain in the body after treatment often leading to chronic illness, and how they can be reactivated by new infections, including Covid-19. Note: This transcribed podcast has been edited for clarity.
Dana Parish: Welcome to the Ticktective Podcast, a program of the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, where our mission is to make Lyme disease easy to diagnose and simple to cure. I’m your guest host today, Dana Parish. I’m the co-author of the book Chronic, and I’m on the advisory board of Bay Area Lyme Foundation. This program offers insightful interviews with clinicians, scientists, patients, and other interesting people. We’re a nonprofit foundation based in Silicon Valley, and thanks to a generous grant that covers a hundred percent of our overhead, all your donations go directly to our research and our prevention programs. For more information about Lyme disease, please visit us at www.bayarealyme.org.

Today, on behalf of Bay Area Lyme Foundation, I am here with brilliant microbiologist Dr. Amy Proal. I have a little bio for her. I’m going to read right now. Dr. Proal serves as president and CEO of PolyBio Research Foundation, and she’s the chief scientific officer of the Long Covid Research Initiative, LCRI. She went to Georgetown, she has a PhD in microbiology from Murdoch University in Australia, and she is a rockstar in the field and a leader in the field of persistent pathogens. She has just come off of a huge press tour for her incredible work and the enormous grant that she just received for her Long Covid research, and I’m so excited to be one of the first people to talk to you after all this.
Amy Proal, PhD: Of course, Dana, thanks so much for having me. That was an amazing intro. I appreciate all of that. It’s great to be interviewed by you. It’s mostly just a friendly conversation, which is fun.
Dana Parish: So, congratulations on your grant. I found out about it all coming together because I saw it in Forbes and then in the LA Times, and then I saw it in the Financial Times and I was like, “Oh my God. This is front page news!” Can you talk a little bit about the work you’re doing in Long Covid?
Amy Proal, PhD: Covid? Yes! What happened is, for the past two and a half years or so—along with my close colleague Mike VanElzakker and a couple other scientists—we started a nonprofit research organization called PolyBio Research Foundation. We jumped into what we call the ‘infection associated chronic disease’ space. So those are chronic conditions initiated or exacerbated by infection, and those include ME/CFS which is a diagnosis in which patients get very debilitatingly ill after other viral infections beyond SARS-CoV-2, and—of course—chronic Lyme disease where we know that patients get bitten been by a tick, or who are sick with tick-borne pathogens, can become extremely debilitatingly ill. So, we were working in conceptualizing collaborative research programs and studies on those conditions, and then the pandemic began, and unfortunately, we knew that a subset of people was going to develop symptoms after Covid because every major pathogen, every major viral or bacterial pathogen, if you read the literature, has been connected to a development of chronic symptoms in a subset of patients.
So, it was very unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was going to be different. We are taking a stand on the direction that our research is going to go in because as a group of scientists and some of the patients involved in our research team, we think that the most evidence that there is right now for the primary driver of Long Covid is the simple fact that it seems like patients may not be fully clearing the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In other words, the virus may no longer be easily identifiable in their blood, but it may hide in their tissue.