Novel Diagnostics for Early Lyme Disease

There are more than 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease every year in the US. Lyme disease is a dangerous bacterial infection transmitted by tick bites and it becomes increasingly severe as the infection progresses. Definitive diagnosis is based on serum-based tests that have fundamental limitations: 1) current tests cannot detect early infections so patients do not receive antibiotic therapy until the infection has progressed, and 2) there is no way to measure if antibiotic therapy has been successful. MicroB-plex will address these two unmet clinical needs by introducing a novel, blood-based diagnostic method that will enable clinicians to diagnose infections earlier and to monitor the success of their interventions.

Lyme disease is the most commonly reported arthropod-borne infection in the US with recent CDC estimates eclipsing 300,000 new cases in 2013. In addition to growing in frequency, the infections have a complex and increasingly severe course. Beginning with mild flu-like symptoms and frequently a signature bull's-eye rash, erythema migrans, Lyme disease can progress to severe articular, neurological and cardiac symptoms, most of which are preventable with early antibiotic therapy. Leading investigators have identified two major shortcomings to the current serology-based methods for the definitive diagnosis of Early Localized Lyme disease. First, the clinical sensitivity in the first four weeks is poor, under 50% at the time of symptom onset, so many patients remain undiagnosed or unconfirmed until the disease has had time to progress. Second, serum antibody levels remain elevated long after the infection has been resolved making the monitoring of therapeutic success or diagnosis of re-infection virtually impossible. MicroB-plex will address these shortcomings by using a novel sample matrix from circulating antibody secreting cells (ASC) for diagnosis of Lyme disease. This novel matrix is MENSA (medium enriched for newly synthesized antibody). In this study, MicroB-plex and its clinical collaborators will test whether MENSA is effective in early Lyme diagnostic (within the first 2 weeks) and if this new approach will track therapeutic success.