Bay Area Lyme Foundation Announces Winners of “Lyme Innovation” Hackathon at White House Event

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:
Tara DiMilia, 908-947-0500, tara.dimilia@TMstrat.com

Bay Area Lyme Foundation Announces Winners of “Lyme Innovation” Hackathon at White House Event

White House Acknowledges Contributions of Program Organizers
Toward Solving Challenges of Lyme Disease

(Cambridge, MA,) October 5, 2016 — As part of the White House Open Data Innovation Summit, Bay Area Lyme Foundation, collaborating with the Spaulding Rehabilitation Network’s Dean Center for Tick Borne Illness, Harvard Medical School Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, MIT Hacking Medicine, University of California, Berkeley, and the Veterans Affairs Center for Innovation, announces the winning teams of Lyme Innovation.  Lyme Innovation is the first ever Hackathon for Lyme disease, which provided a forum for more than 100 scientists, clinicians, researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors from a variety of disciplines to brainstorm solutions for this potentially devastating disease.

Bay Area Lyme Foundation Increases Annual ‘Emerging Leader Award’ Grants to $350,000 for Lyme Disease Research

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:
Tara DiMilia, 908-947-0500, tara.dimilia@TMstrat.com

Bay Area Lyme Foundation Increases Annual ‘Emerging Leader Award’ Grants to $350,000 for Lyme Disease Research

2017 additional award invites applications from Associate Professors through Full Professors

Silicon Valley, California, October 3, 2016 – Bay Area Lyme Foundation, supporter of research aimed at making Lyme disease easy to diagnose and simple to cure, announced today that it is beginning to accept applications for a new $250,000 grant award that has been added to its existing “Emerging Leader Award” portfolio of yearly funding.  Made available to researchers through the generosity of the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation and the Laurel Foundation, the portfolio also includes the $100,000 “Emerging Leader Award” which has previously been granted to researchers from Harvard, Stanford, UCSF, NC State and Louisiana State University.

Ticks, Ticks, and More Ticks!

By Bay Area Lyme

A Conversation with Dr. Nate Nieto, Northern Arizona University and Head of the Free Tick Testing Program


Nate Nieto_312Just six months ago, Bay Area Lyme launched a free Tick Testing Program through a partnership with Nate Nieto, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University, and his lab.

The lab accept ticks from any state in the US and ticks are tested for several bacterial infections. The goal is to learn more about the ecological distribution of the major tick vectors and the prevalence of tick-borne pathogens that people encounter in different locations around the country ultimately to improve both prevention and diagnostic measures.

The initial response to this program far exceeded any anticipations — thousands of ticks poured in from all over the nation! Here, we sat down with Dr. Nieto to talk about what he has seen in these first few months and how the program will continue to grow and evolve. 

For more information about how to submit a sample, please refer to the Tick Testing page.

Pets and People: More than Companions

By Bay Area Lyme

Michael Yabsley with petThe following is a post from a guest author, Dr. Michael J. Yabsley, MS, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Population Health at the College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Georgia and Board of Directors, Companion Animal Parasite Council.

He shares some important observations on the relationship between our pets and their people, especially in the context of vector-borne pathogens like Lyme disease.

Pets are our companions. They share our lives, our homes and our family time. We often share the mutual love of activities such as hiking or simply playing fetch in the backyard. While companionship is clearly why we have pets, our bond with them is often far greater than we appreciate — we share the same environment and more often than not, the same health concerns. At the top of this list are several vector-borne diseases.

California Strains of Lyme Bacteria May Survive Antibiotic Treatment, According to New Study

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:
Tara DiMilia, 908-947-0500, tara.dimilia@TMstrat.com

California Strains of Lyme Bacteria May Survive Antibiotic Treatment, According to New Study

This new study funded by Bay Area Lyme Foundation identifies 20 FDA-approved compounds that are more effective in inhibiting persistent Lyme bacteria than standard treatment

Silicon Valley, CA, April 6, 2016—A laboratory study published today, funded by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, is the first study to demonstrate that strains of Lyme bacteria present in California ticks are able to form persister bacteria, which do not respond well to treatment.  The study is also the first to identify FDA-approved therapies that may be more effective in inhibiting these specific strains of persister bacteria in the lab than doxycycline, the most commonly prescribed treatment for Lyme disease. The study was conducted by Stanford School of Medicine researchers and published in the Open Access publication Drug Design, Development and Therapy. View full study here: http://www.dovepress.com/articles.php?article_id=26319

Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease in the US: Current State of Affairs

By Bay Area Lyme

Dr. Ben Beard_CDCDr. Ben Beard, PhD, Chief Bacterial Diseases Branch at the CDC, visited with Bay Area Lyme and invited guests as part of the foundation’s ongoing speaker series. This donor-sponsored forum brings together researchers and other experts in an intimate forum for topical discussions with community members. Past events have included Emerging Leader Award winners, clinicians, and patient advocates.

The next event, on Wednesday, March 2, will feature Dr. Christine Green, Director of Education for ILADS, and Allie Cashel, author of Suffering the Silence: Chronic Lyme Disease in an Age of Denial.

For more information, see Speaker Series.

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As Chief of the CDC’s Bacterial Diseases Branch, Division of Vector-Borne Diseases in Fort Collins, Colorado, Dr. Beard coordinates CDC’s programs on Lyme disease, plague, and tularemia. His scientific interests include public health and the biology, ecology, and genetics of insect-borne diseases and vectors. More recently, he has been extensively involved in the CDC’s work to understand and mitigate the potential impact of climate variability and change on infectious disease ecology. He shared the CDC’s concerns about the expanding disease burden and distribution of Lyme and affirmed the importance of attracting new research interest and efforts focused on Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections.

Bay Area Lyme Foundation Offers Free Tick Testing Nationwide

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:
Tara DiMilia, 908-947-0500, tara.dimilia@TMstrat.com

Bay Area Lyme Foundation Offers Free Tick Testing Nationwide

Free Tick Testing Initiative Is First In The Nation and Aims to Map Tick-borne Diseases Across the U.S. Through Crowd-sourcing

Silicon Valley, CA, February 16, 2016 — Bay Area Lyme Foundation, a leading nonprofit funder of innovative Lyme disease research in the US, today announced that the Foundation is the first to offer free tick testing for residents of the U.S.  Testing is available through a partnership with Nate Nieto, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University and his lab.  Bay Area Lyme Foundation hopes to use this crowd-sourced data as a vehicle for gaining a greater understanding of the geography of tick-borne diseases in the U.S.  If successful in accumulating data, it will be the first crowd-sourced study of its kind.

Can We “Hack” Our Way to Some New Solutions for Lyme?

By Bay Area Lyme

Reflections from a Promising Dialogue at the AAAS Conference in Washington, DC, November 17-18

by Lia Gaertner, BAL Science Committee

AAAS_Logo and magSome weeks ago, two members of the Bay Area Lyme Foundation Science Committee, Wendy Adams and Lia Gaertner, attended a leadership symposium in Washington, DC, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and entitled, “Innovations-X: Rising Above the Politics for Progress in Science.”  The AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society, with more than 125,000 individual and institutional members, and the publisher of Science magazine. Its mission is “to advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people.” At this event, there were three “wicked problems” discussed over two days: climate change, global/mobile health, and Lyme disease.  This blog, written by Lia Gaertner, will focus only on the Lyme portion of the conference.

Straight Talk about Biofilms: A New Answer for Treating Lyme Disease?

By Bay Area Lyme

Biofilms that form in the human body are up to ten thousand times more resistant to antibiotics than free-floating bacteria, making them very difficult to treat medically. These biofilms are responsible for the extreme persistence of many difficult to treat illnesses like Legionnaire’s disease, Staphylococcus aureus (“Staph”), and infectious bronchitis, that can trouble patients with frustrating symptoms for years.

Some years ago researchers showed that biofilms might also be helping the Lyme-causing bacteria evade treatment.(1) These findings have excited Lyme researchers who have since been exploring various treatment strategies designed to target the entire bacterial colony. If successful, these treatments might bring long-needed relief to patients with late-stage or persistent Lyme disease where antibiotics have previously failed.

At Bay Area Lyme Foundation, we are also inspired by these discoveries and hopeful about the treatment options they may bring. Recently we invited Daina Zeng, a Senior Scientist at Agile Sciences, to talk about the work her team is doing adapting Agile’s proprietary non-toxic organic compounds to disperse these bacterial colonies (technology they have leveraged for medical, agricultural, and industrial uses). Her post follows.