OUR WORK
The rate of tick-borne infection is severely underappreciated and underestimated. A few decades ago, discovery of “Lyme disease” in the Lyme County in Connecticut spurred unprecedented public attention to tick-borne disease. Soon after, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initiated nation-wide surveillance, and newly revised estimates suggest that there about 476,000 new cases of Lyme disease occurring every year in the United States. In addition, more than ten newly recognized tick-borne pathogens and diseases were identified in the Western Hemisphere during the last two decades. Therefore, there is an urgent and unmet need to study tick-borne infection in the United States. Understanding how ticks recognize and suppress invading microbes is the study of Tick Immunity or tick immune response, and this knowledge could be used to develop future prevention and treatment strategies to ultimately eliminate these pathogens and cure diseases like Lyme disease, most prevalent in the United States.
To facilitate this need and meet the concerns of a growing public health issue, our team has been working under a PO1 multi-project grant awarded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In its current cycle, beginning 2025, the full title of the Tick Immunity Program Project is Ixodes scapularis Immuno-Developmental and Metabolic Signaling Pathways and Interference with Ticks and Tick-borne Pathogens.
This tick biology program is the first-of-its-kind in tick-borne illness research, and has three major research components centered around tick immune responses, as well as a Tick Resources Core, each with a different institution at the helm. The central goal is to generate fundamental knowledge of tick immunobiology, particularly to understand the molecular mechanisms by which the Ixodes scapularis or black-legged tick's immune system recognizes invading microbes, interacts with various metabolic and immune pathways, and ultimately impacts pathogen persistence and transmission. The program is studying the most common tick (the deer tick, also known as blacklegged tick) that carries the two most prevalent tick-borne pathogens due to their impact on human health and their unique characteristics on a cellular level. Borrelia burgdorferi is the pathogen that causes Lyme disease, and Anaplasma phagocytophilum causes Anaplasmosis.
Dr. Utpal Pal of the University of Maryland, College Park, and his team lead research on Project 1, which focuses on tick signaling pathways and their regulation of vector immune-development. Such pathways involve a phenomenon that Pal discovered originally in his lab: crosstalk between mammals and arthropods via indirect immune responses in ticks, wherein a tick feeding on its mammalian host (most commonly mice or deer) can recognize some sort of illness indicator in the blood as it is being ingested, triggering a non-specific line of immune defense to try to kill whatever is there. Pal and his team also handle the Administrative Core for the program and help to advise and coordinate all projects.
Dr. Joao Pedra, Principal Investigator from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, will lead Project 2 studies addressing the regulation of tick immunity via metabolic pathways.
Dr. Erol Fikrig, Principal Investigator from Yale University, will lead Project 3, which will build on findings from the above studies to interrogate whether tick immune-developmental and metabolic pathway components could serve as anti-tick prevention targets, as a novel strategy that could be used to block successful tick feeding and pathogen transmission, which in turn reduce the incidence of tick-borne diseases.
Dr. Jonathan Oliver from University of Minnesota will serve as Technical Core Lead for the program, providing additional technical support, including protocols and tools, to facilitate this research as Director of the Tick Resources Core.
Overall Specific Aims
Aim 1: Operate resource cores: We will continue to operate the established cores: a) Tick Resources Core, to provide the vector resources, and b) Administrative Core, facilitating seamless project leadership, communications, and synergy.
Aim 2: Signaling pathways regulating vector immune-developmental cascades
Aim 3: Metabolic pathways regulating tick immune responses
Aim 4: Tick immune-developmental and metabolic pathways as anti-tick vaccine targets
Click on Each Project to Learn More
Scientific Advisory Board