Lyme research Archives - Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Science Translational Medicine Study Funded by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation Identifies FDA-approved Piperacillin as More Effective, Targeted Treatment for Lyme Disease

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Science Translational Medicine Study Funded by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation Identifies FDA-approved Piperacillin as More Effective, Targeted Treatment for Lyme Disease

An additional Science Translational Medicine study also funded by Bay Area Lyme Foundation uncovers how lingering bacterial cell wall molecules may contribute to chronic Lyme symptoms

PORTOLA VALLEY, Calif. April 23, 2025 – Bay Area Lyme Foundation, a leading sponsor of Lyme disease research in the US, announces two pre-clinical studies published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Translational Medicine. The studies demonstrate promising implications for improved Lyme disease treatment and understanding of chronic Lyme through peptidoglycan, a molecule found in the cell wall of the bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb), which causes Lyme disease. The first study finds piperacillin, an FDA-approved treatment for pneumonia that inhibits peptidoglycan production, may be a more effective treatment for Lyme disease than the current “gold standard” treatment, doxycycline, which is not effective for up to 20% of patients. The second study uncovers how lingering peptidoglycan builds up in the joint fluid and liver, contributing to chronic Lyme symptoms, which affect over 20% of patients treated for Lyme disease.

“Piperacillin may be a game-changer for improving Lyme disease treatment, which is currently a challenge for researchers and physicians. Furthermore, our new mechanistic understanding of how piperacillin affects peptidoglycan synthesis is unexpectedly informing our development of a biomarker-based approach to diagnose acute Lyme disease,” said Brandon Jutras, PhD, associate professor of Microbiology-Immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and a Bay Area Lyme Foundation 2021 Emerging Leader Award winner. “Our second study explores the role of peptidoglycan in chronic Lyme symptoms; peptidoglycan influences an inflammatory and chronic illness response for weeks or even months after infection, adding to the growing evidence that remnants of bacteria and viruses can stick around and keep affecting the body, similar to the occurrence of Long COVID in some patients.”

Connection and Collaboration Bringing Hope: Understanding the Immune System’s Role in Post-Treatment Lyme Disease

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Bay Area Lyme Spotlights Series

“Philanthropy is mission-critical to advance the field of Lyme disease research.”

– Bill Robinson, MD, PhD

In this conversation, we talk with Bill Robinson, MD, PhD, the James W. Raitt professor of medicine and division chief, division of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford University, about how his work is helping us understand the immune system’s response to a Lyme infection. A long-term collaborator and grant recipient of Bay Area Lyme Foundation, Dr. Robinson reflects on his history with our organization, the plight of Lyme patients, the paucity of government funding for investigations into the disease, where Lyme disease research is now, and where he thinks it’s headed in the next 5-10 years.

UCSF’s New Lyme Clinical Trials Center: Addressing the Need for Evidence-Based Treatments for Lyme & TBD Patients

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Bay Area Lyme Happenings Series

UCSF has joined the Cohen Foundation’s nationwide Lyme Clinical Trials Network (CTN) for Lyme and tick-borne diseases. The new Lyme Clinical Trials Center (CTC) at UCSF was funded by a $1m grant from Bay Area Lyme Foundation and is led by Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, and Felicia Chow, MD, as co-principal investigators. As the West Coast ‘node’ in the network, UCSF’s new Lyme Clinical Trials Center will focus on interventional trials and diagnostic studies to improve diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease.

In this presentation to patients with Lyme disease in Marin County just north of San Francisco, Dr. Chow explains how the CTC allows for a more diverse patient population to participate in Lyme clinical trials, which is critical for developing therapies that can help a wider range of patients. UCSF’s involvement also aims to help Bay Area Lyme raise awareness that Lyme disease is prevalent year-round in almost all California counties.

Dr. Chow discusses an upcoming trial at UCSF that will evaluate the use of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to improve cognitive symptoms in patients with chronic Lyme disease. Additionally, UCSF researchers are exploring the use of metagenomic sequencing and machine learning to develop more accurate diagnostic tests for Lyme and other tick-borne infections.

Note: This transcript of Dr. Chow’s presentation has been edited for length and clarity.

“I hope that through these clinical trials, we’ll be able to identify therapies that are helpful to patients and that, as a result, have an impact on clinically meaningful outcomes—from day-to-day function, quality of life, and all of those important measures that indicate that a treatment is successful.”

– Felicia Chow, MD

The Numbers Don’t Lie: Why the NIH Consistently Underfunds Research into Lyme Disease

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

An In-depth Interview with Kris Newby, Author of “Bitten”

“We need to let the NIH know that we’re watching them, and we want results.”

– Kris Newby

Kris Newby, author of ‘Bitten,’ is investigating government spending on Lyme disease research, which is strongly influenced by the flawed original disease definition of Lyme disease. She summarizes the impact of the 2018 Tick-Borne Disease Working Group’s report, explains where research funding has and is currently being directed, and calls for money to be spent on better diagnostics and treatments for Lyme disease sufferers instead. Kris explores potential actions that Lyme patients can take to help direct the course of funding, such as communicating with Congress, supporting advocacy groups, and donating to research organizations.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Bay Area Lyme Foundation.

Kris Newby is watching our government, and watching quite closely. She has a lot to say about how government money is spent on a disease that, according to CDC estimates, infects almost 500,000 people annually in the US, causing untold pain, suffering, loss of livelihood, and, in extreme cases, severe mental illness, including suicidal and homicidal events.

Of course, we are talking about Lyme disease—the pariah of infection-associated chronic conditions.

Understanding Infection-associated Chronic Illness: How the Immune System Responds to Persistent Infection

Distinguished Speaker Series with Michal Tal, PhD

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Distinguished Speaker Series Transcript

“I want to leave you with hope. I think we’re going to be unstoppable because I think that these are solvable problems. These are answerable questions. I think that there are already a lot of existing tools in immunology that just need to be brought into the fight, and we can change this.”

– Michal Caspi Tal, PhD

Michal Caspi Tal: In the chronic illness world, I think that there is something about hope with a capital ‘H’ that is precious. I think it always has to be. I want to talk a little bit about what my lab is doing, where I think we could go in the future and the hope that I have for how we move forward, how we solve this, and how we change this for those who come after us. So, I’ll tell you a little bit about some of the recent things that have come out of the lab, what the lab is working on now, and where we want to go.

New Study Shows How Borrelia burgdorferi Evades the Immune System

Recently, we published a study in collaboration with Hanna Ollila’s lab where we compared people who’ve had Lyme and have had a diagnosis of Lyme versus people who’ve never had a diagnosis of Lyme. We found a genetic difference in a sweat protein that nobody—including me—had ever thought about before. We tested it against the bacteria in our lab, and we saw that it had a huge effect; we tested it in mice, and it had a huge effect. So that’s really exciting. We had another paper that came online yesterday that is one of these last papers from my postdoctoral work over at Stanford, where we actually managed to figure out some of how Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme, manages to evade immune clearance.

Any respectable pathogen that can establish a persistent infection needs to figure out your immune system to the point that it can evade it. The fact that it has persisted means that it was able to evade your immune clearance. And so, I got to that from a very interesting direction working on immune regulation, trying to understand these brakes on the immune response and how they impact the response to infection. The immune system has the power to kill you and obviously, nobody has any incentive for that to happen. So, there are a lot of mechanisms in place to put brakes on the immune system and reign it in. One of the huge developments in cancer over the last two decades has been reevaluating the question: can we take those brakes off? So in my postdoc, I was studying a particular checkpoint where this was turning into an exciting immuno-oncology target, and I said, ‘I want to look at how this checkpoint is used in infection.’ I realized that this checkpoint was being used to help you survive an acute infection, but created a vulnerability for pathogens to evade immune clearance and establish chronic infection much like it allows cancer cells to evade immune clearance. In an amazing collaboration with Irv Weissman, Balyn Zaro, and Jenifer Coburn we realized that the bacteria that cause Lyme disease manipulate this brake and that’s how I became fascinated with Lyme. But I also became concerned about turning off this brake in cancer patients because I was concerned about what would happen if you used this on cancer patients during an active infection. Indeed, the clinical trials on this drug were ended due to increased death from infection, and I wish it hadn’t been tested during a worldwide pandemic.

Unlocking the Mysteries of Tick-borne Infections: Lyme Disease Biobank’s Tissue Collection Program Drives Research Momentum

Kirsten Stein and the Lyme Disease Biobank

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

BAL Leading the Way Series

“My family knows that after I die, my tissues will be donated to Lyme Disease Biobank to provide researchers with the vital material they need to solve this horrible disease. I urge anyone with chronic/persistent Lyme to register with NDRI today. Let’s end this suffering together.”

-Kirsten Stein, Lyme Advocate

Lyme Disease Biobank^®, led by Liz Horn, PhD, MBI, is central to Bay Area Lyme Foundation’s 10-year search for answers to Lyme’s most intractable questions and is the most important program in the Foundation’s mission to make Lyme disease easy to diagnose and simple to cure.

The original Lyme Disease Biobank sample collection launched in 2014 focused on obtaining blood, urine, and serum samples from patients with early/acute Lyme disease. Once this program had been fully established, the Lyme Disease Biobank team explored adding tissue samples to the Biobank. Tissue samples could help researchers expand their investigations beyond the early stage of infection into how chronic/persistent Lyme and other tick-borne diseases impact the central nervous system, joints, and organs of Lyme patients.

With the tissue bank objectives defined, the Biobank connected with specialist organizations to provide the critical support needed to support sample collection and make the development of a tissue bank a reality.

Post-Mortem Tissue Collection Planning

Lyme Disease Biobank established a key partnership with the nonprofit National Disease Research Interchange (NDRI) to provide logistics for post-mortem tissue collection for the new tissue program. The Biobank also partnered with MyLymeData.org, allowing Lyme patients registered with the Biobank to link their MyLymeData profile to their tissue donation if desired. Bringing these two resources together provides for the organizing and recovery of post-mortem (after death) tissue. It ensures samples include redacted (removes identifying information) detailed patient medical histories—an important nuance for Lyme disease researchers.

“Although it is an emotional and difficult idea for anyone to plan to donate parts of their body to science after they have died, we believe that this decision is an important way for Lyme patients to change the course of Lyme disease research. Having access to tissues from the brain, heart, joints, and central nervous system of Lyme patients allows researchers to prove unequivocally that Lyme is present in tissue and contributes to patient suffering,” explains Linda Giampa, Executive Director, Bay Area Lyme Foundation and board member of Lyme Disease Biobank.

Young Hearts, Hidden Battles: A pediatric infectious disease physician’s perspective on Lyme disease and neuropsychiatric manifestations

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Distinguished Speaker Series Transcript

“Everything about this disease is infinitely more complex and nuanced than is taught to physicians.”

– Charlotte Mao, MD MPH

Charlotte Mao: Thank you Dana for that amazing introduction and Brandi too. I want to thank Brandi for so generously opening up your beautiful home for this event and Bay Area Lyme Foundation for inviting me to speak tonight about my personal perspectives as a pediatric infectious disease physician about Lyme disease in children, particularly neuropsychiatric manifestations.

When Brandi asked if I might give a talk for this Speaker Series, I suggested this topic because, first, I hope there might be something instructive in some of my personal musings on key lessons I’ve learned about Lyme disease in the course of caring for children with this contested disease. Second, I want to highlight neuropsychiatric manifestations because I feel they generally are the least recognized by physicians as being potential manifestations of Lyme disease. Yet, taking into account all levels of severity, they are, in my view, actually quite common—certainly not uncommon—and when severe, they are among the most devastating of Lyme manifestations to the lives of children and their families.

New Study Reveals Potential Treatment for Neurologic Lyme Disease

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Study Reveals Potential Treatment for Neurologic Lyme Disease

Blocking certain fibroblast growth factor receptors is shown to be effective in reducing inflammation and cell death caused by neurologic Lyme infection in laboratory studies

PORTOLA VALLEY, Calif. April 18, 2024—Bay Area Lyme Foundation, a leading sponsor of Lyme disease research in the US, recently announced the publication of a laboratory study showing that fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) inhibitors may be appropriate as an anti-inflammatory supplementary treatment for neurologic Lyme disease, for which there are no universally effective treatments. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Immunology, this study shows FGFRs are activated in response to both live and non-viable Lyme bacteria in preclinical brain tissue models. Further, inhibition of FGFR1, FGFR2, and FGFR3 may help mitigate the neuroinflammatory and neuropathogenic effects of infection by the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi.

“Our research shows a potential connection between neurological Lyme disease and several other neurological conditions, and this common pathway may explain why Lyme can be confused with many other conditions. Increasing our knowledge of FGFRs and their effect on the brain will help us understand the common mechanisms that may underlie Lyme disease and other neurological diseases,” said Geetha Parthasarathy, PhD, assistant professor at Tulane National Primate Research Center, Tulane School of Medicine, and a Bay Area Lyme Foundation 2019 Emerging Leader Award winner. “This data shows that FGFRs can be novel targets of anti-inflammatory therapeutics in Lyme patients with persistent neuroinflammation.”

“Our findings from this and our previous studies also offer important insight that may help to explain why some patients still experience chronic neurological symptoms even after a short course of antibiotics,” added Dr. Parthasarathy.

New Study Demonstrates Protein May Provide Protection Against Lyme Disease

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Study Demonstrates Protein May Provide Protection Against Lyme Disease

Sweat protein protects against Lyme disease in vivo and is a potential therapeutic avenue for drug development

PORTOLA VALLEY, Calif. April 3, 2024—Bay Area Lyme Foundation, a leading sponsor of Lyme disease research in the US, recently announced the identification of an unknown common missense variant at the gene encoding for Secretoglobin family 1D member 2 (SCGB1D2) protein that increases the susceptibility for Lyme disease as well as two previously known variants. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications, this study shows normal versions of the SCGB1D2 protein prevent infection by Borrelia in vivo and appear to be a host defense factor present in the skin, sweat, and other secretions, opening an exciting potential therapeutic avenue for Lyme disease. This research was also featured on NBC10 News in Boston.

“We are excited that our international collaboration with Hanna Ollia’s group and our co-authors has turned up such an exciting and unexplored avenue in the body’s defenses against Lyme disease,” said Michal Tal, PhD, Principal Scientist in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, and a Bay Area Lyme Foundation 2018 Emerging Leader Award winner. “This discovery reveals a human protein with protective activity against the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, which we hope could lead to a future path for exploring new methods to prevent and treat Lyme disease.”

This research has shown that the genetic variant of the SCGB1D2 which creates a misshapen protein appears to be specific for Lyme disease and has not been previously reported as associated with any other disease, phenotype, or infection. The researchers also found that about one-third of the population carries a genetic variant of this protein that is associated with Lyme disease in genome-wide association studies (GWAS).

Research Funded by Bay Area Lyme Foundation Identifies New Investigational Therapy Regimen Capable of Irreversibly Damaging Lyme Bacteria in Laboratory Tests

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Research Funded by Bay Area Lyme Foundation Identifies New Investigational Therapy Regimen Capable of Irreversibly Damaging Lyme Bacteria in Laboratory Tests

Inspired by research that targets cancer tumors, these new findings in Lyme could also lead to novel R&D strategies for other diseases

PORTOLA VALLEY, Calif. November 1, 2023—Bay Area Lyme Foundation, a leading sponsor of Lyme disease research in the US, today announced the development of a potential new drug, HS-291, that targets and destroys Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Chemical Biology, this laboratory study represents a novel paradigm shift for anti-microbial treatment research as it is the first to target and inhibit Borrelia burgdorferi HtpG (high temperature protein G), a specific type of enzyme within the bacteria that causes Lyme disease— a condition affecting nearly 500,000 new patients annually. The research was conducted at Duke University School of Medicine, with collaboration from University of North Carolina, Tulane University, and Stanford University, and HS-291 is currently in preclinical stage testing at UC Davis.

“As Lyme disease is currently treated with broad spectrum antibiotics and there are no targeted treatments, we are particularly excited about this discovery, and hopeful that our novel Lyme disease therapeutic HS-291 will specifically destroy the Lyme bacterium without off-target effects or antibiotic resistance,” said Timothy Haystead, PhD, professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, Duke University School of Medicine, Bay Area Lyme Foundation grantee, and co-lead author. “This research has been an incredible opportunity to leverage knowledge from oncology to Lyme disease in order to design an investigational therapeutic that could one day benefit hundreds of thousands of patients with Lyme.”

This new discovery has implications beyond Lyme disease as it demonstrates that using the drug HS-291 to deliver cellular toxins to HtpG, a type of non-essential enzyme that assists the folding or unfolding of large and complex proteins, greatly expands what can be considered druggable within any pathogen and opens a whole new area of infectious disease research.