The new efforts build on the basic strategy of those vaccines. “In terms of difficulty from a biological and medical standpoint, it was relatively straightforward.” “It was not very difficult to develop,” Klempner recalls of the vaccine, Imulym, made by Pasteur Merieux Connaught but never brought to market.

Klempner knows that well, as he worked on one of two Lyme vaccines that showed strong clinical trial results in the 1990s.

The lack of a human version has little to do with the science of making one. If any of these products are eventually approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it would put humans nearly on par with dogs they can get four Lyme vaccines made just for them.

Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine report promising results from animal studies with a vaccine that teaches the body to recognize tick saliva and send an immune response to the site of the bite before the bacterium is transmitted.

The medication developed by Klempner and colleagues at MassBiologics, which they call a vaccine alternative because it directly delivers a monoclonal antibody rather that spurring development of multiple antibodies in patients, is aiming for a phase 2-3 human trial next spring.

A vaccine developed by Pfizer and Valneva, which induces the development of antibodies in people to stop the disease-causing bacterium within ticks, entered a phase 3 human trial last month.

The current projects come two decades after the first human Lyme vaccine, LYMErix, was pulled from the market because of factors that researchers believe their new products will overcome. The disease sets off a series of escalating symptoms, starting with a red rash, fatigue, fever, headache, and a mild stiff neck, and sometimes escalating if left untreated to serious complications to joints (arthritis), the heart, and the nervous system. Targeting ticks to prevent Lyme rather than fighting off an infection after it begins is the fundamental strategy behind three projects that aim to create the only medication to prevent the disease in people. “The patient provides the vehicle to deliver the antibody to the infected tick.” Klempner, MD, a professor of medicine at UMass Chan. “We are trying to deliver a medicine to a tick so that it doesn’t pass on the infection to the patient,” says Mark S. They injected the antibody into humans so that people can transmit the antibody to ticks that bite them. That was the task taken on by a group of researchers at MassBiologics of UMass Chan Medical School (UMass Chan) in Massachusetts: They developed a way to get an antibody into ticks to neutralize the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, the most common vector-born disease in the United States.īut no, the researchers did not give shots to ticks.

The Heart Has Reasons by Mark Klempner