Lyme Disease Diagnostics

Lyme Disease

Incidence has doubled over the past few decades with ~30,000 confirmed new case per year, which is likely an underestimate due to undiagnosed disease. Current diagnostic tests are only effective several weeks after infection since they rely on the host development of antibodies. Projects in our group are focusing on identifying biomarkers that can be diagnostic of infection at a much earlier time point. Furthermore, we are seeking to identify biomarkers predictive of response to acute antibiotic therapies to clear the infection relative to those who suffer long term consequences of the disease. To date, we have identified several protein biomarkers that show promise on both of these domains.

We continue to leverage in-house proteomic technologies as well as our longitudinal PD3 cloud approaches to better understand Lyme disease infection and progression and potentially identify new therapeutic targets as well.

Current and recent funding for these projects include support from the Jeff and Liesl Wilke, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation, Bay Area Lyme Foundation, Global Lyme Alliance, and NIH.

Recent papers include:

mRNA transcript distribution bias between Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria and their outer membrane vesicles. Malge A, Ghai V, Reddy PJ, Baxter D, Kim TK, Moritz RL, Wang K. (2018).  FEMS Microbiol Lett. Jul 1;365(13). doi: 10.1093/femsle/fny135. PMID: 29846577

Whole genome sequence and comparative analysis of Borrelia burgdorferi MM1. Jabbari N, Glusman G, Joesch-Cohen LM, Reddy PJ, Moritz RL, Hood L, Lausted CG. (2018).  PLoS One. Jun 11;   13(6):e0198135. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0198135. PMID: 29889842

Novel metrics for quantifying bacterial genome composition skews. Joesch-Cohen LM, Robinson M, Jabbari N, Lausted CG, Glusman G. (2018). BMC Genomics. Jul11;19(1):528. doi: 10.1186/ s12864-018-4913-5. PMID: 29996771

Measurement of organ-specific and acute-phase blood protein levels in early Lyme disease. Zhou Y, Qin S, Sun M, Tang L, Yan X, Kim TK, Caballero J, Glusman G, Brunkow ME, Soloski MJ, Rebman AW, Scavarda C, Cooper D, Omenn GS, Moritz RL, Wormser GP, Price ND, Aucott JN, Hood L. (2019). J Proteome Res. Articles ASAP Oct. 16, 2019. doi: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.9b00569. PMID: 31618575

Current Project Leads:

Kai Wang	Mary Brunkow	Leroy Hood