Posted on 04/24/2025 5:57:48 PM PDT by Red Badger
A reengineered bacterial protein may finally pave the way for a human Lyme disease vaccine. It exposes a weak spot that our immune system can target, offering real hope after decades of failed attempts. For decades, scientists have searched for a way to outsmart Lyme disease, a stealthy infection that affects nearly half a million people each year in the U.S. Now, a breakthrough may be within reach.
Researchers have zeroed in on a bacterial protein called CspZ that helps the Lyme bacteria hide from the immune system. By cleverly reengineering this protein to expose its most vulnerable part, they’ve created a version that can trigger a powerful immune response in lab models. This discovery could pave the way for a long-awaited human vaccine—and potentially even curb the disease at its wildlife source.
Urgent Need for a Human Lyme Vaccine
Developing an effective vaccine remains a top priority for researchers tackling Lyme disease, which affects an estimated 476,000 people in the United States each year. The illness can lead to serious long-term symptoms, including chronic fatigue and joint pain. Although several vaccine candidates have come close to success, none have yet reached commercial use for humans.
Now, after decades of research and setbacks, scientists are focusing on a promising new target: a bacterial protein called CspZ. This protein helps the Lyme bacteria hide from the immune system, making it harder for the body to detect and fight the infection. CspZ first caught scientists’ attention because it appears to be conserved across many strains of Lyme bacteria, suggesting it could help create a broadly protective vaccine.
Engineering a Hidden Immune Trigger
“We’ve known for years that CspZ would be an ideal vaccine target because it’s produced in abundance during infection, but the challenge was that in its natural form, the protein doesn’t trigger a strong immune response,” said Yi-Pin Lin, an associate professor of infectious disease and global health at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. “To get around this, we needed to engineer the protein’s structure to reveal hidden regions that the immune system could recognize and respond to effectively.”
It took several attempts, but Lin and his collaborators identified the specific tweaks to CspZ’s genetic code to create an engineered protein that produced a robust immune response in pre-clinical studies in mice. With this success and seeing that mice and human immune cells react similarly to the modified CspZ protein—giving hope that this could carry over to patients—the researchers now wanted to use three-dimensional imaging to better understand how their new vaccine target works.
Targeting Lyme’s Achilles Heel
Their latest study, appearing April 7 in the journal Nature Communications, shows that the modified CspZ triggers an immune response targeting the CspZ protein’s exposed “Achilles heel.” Normally, the native CspZ remains hidden from the immune system by binding to molecules responsible for detecting dangerous bacteria or parasites, making it inaccessible to immune defenses. However, the modified CspZ trains the immune system to produce antibodies that recognize CspZ’s exposed region in its altered form, making it much easier for the host’s white blood cells to find and eliminate Lyme disease-causing bacteria.
Making the Vaccine More Durable
“What we also found through structure-based vaccine design is that we could further modify CspZ to make the molecule more stable at body temperature,” said Lin, who is a co-corresponding author on the study. “This allows the engineered CspZ protein to persist longer in the body to promote continuous production of protective antibodies, which significantly reduces how many vaccine booster shots are needed.”
The work was led by an international team of experts, including Lin at Tufts University; Maria Elena Bottazzi and Wen-Hsiang Chen at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Baylor College of Medicine; Ching-Lin Hsieh, formerly at the University of Texas; and Kalvis Brangulis at the Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre and Riga Stradins University.
Next Steps: Trials and Wild Reservoirs
The researchers plan to explore several applications for their patented vaccine strategy against Lyme disease. This may include working with commercial partners to develop platforms for the safe testing and delivery of engineered CspZ protein-based vaccines by conducting human clinical trials or immunizing natural populations of the wild, white-footed mice that carry the bacteria that ticks transfer to infect humans.
“Vaccine development is a very long process, and when we’re doing experiments, 90% of the time they don’t work,” said Lin. “But having a vaccine is better than having no vaccine, so having collaborators who see problems differently helped us overcome challenges at each step.”
Reference:
“Mechanistic insights into the structure-based design of a CspZ-targeting Lyme disease vaccine”
by Kalvis Brangulis, Jill Malfetano, Ashley L. Marcinkiewicz, Alan Wang, Yi-Lin Chen, Jungsoon Lee, Zhuyun Liu, Xiuli Yang, Ulrich Strych, Dagnija Tupina, Inara Akopjana, Maria-Elena Bottazzi, Utpal Pal, Ching-Lin Hsieh, Wen-Hsiang Chen and Yi-Pin Lin, 7 April 2025, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-58182-x
Research reported in this article was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the U.S. Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs. Complete information on authors, funders, methodology, limitations and conflicts of interest is available in the published paper.
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PING!....................
I’m not certain, but the photo looks like a dog tick, which is not an ixodid and therefore does not transmit Lyme.
It’s just a stock tick photo from their archives.
Deer Ticks have a white spot on their back, IIRC............
There was a Lyme vaccine trial at Johns Hopkins in the 1990’s. I knew someone in the trial. A young man in his 20s in good health. He took the vaccine and got Lyme Disease. Last I heard, which was a few years after that, he was very sick with arthritis and other problems from the vaccine induced Lyme Disease. No thanks. Mot for me or pets.
Odd this came out right now.
A ‘rice bowl’ stunt????
Why do I say that?
Locally Mt Spurr, a local suddenly volcano went to “yellow alert” status, right *after* Trump started chain sawing the FedGov budget.
Our Senators immediately started bucking for sperate funding the Volcano Center. Now that it looks like the funding will come thru — we now get “maybe Spurr isn’t all the active...
Yup - all I see is a rice bowl scam....
I won’t probably ever get another vaccine in my lifetime. Unless they have 20 years of data and testing. I’m out. If a vaccine was approved today in 20 years I’d be dead most likely. I hope the democrats think Biden was worth the collateral damage to science, healthcare, education etc.
I'm with you -- 100%!
I was considered very high risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. I learned all I could and was able to convince a few of my docs why I was not taking it. Those I couldn't convince, I just flat out said NO WAY. I never took the shot and am so grateful I did not.
By the way, I had COVID twice and am still here to right this comment.
how bout they kill off the ticks infected to begin with, instead of jabbing more people?
Spray nicotine all over the forest would work.
Nicotine used to be in all the commercial bug killers, like Black Flag, HotShot etc.
I do not give a flying F. No vaccines for me. And my MD agrees.
I got a classic bullseye bruise symptomatic of a tick bite. I went to a doctor and got a blood test. His receptionist, not him, tells me she looked at the results and I don’t have lymes. One week later, I wake up with the left side of my face paralyzed. I go to another doctor and the first thing he asks me is ‘have you had a tick bite’. I told him I was tested for lymes and it came back clean. He says ‘You have Bell’s palsy which is a side effect of lymes disease, and we’re going to test you again’. They did and it came back positive. They put me on a strong antibiotic regimen. I asked if the paralysis would go away. He said it could go away in 2 weeks, or 6 months or never, as it was impossible to predict. Two weeks to the day, I woke up without the paralysis thank God.
I have read that some people become totally disabled from Lyme Disease like they have severe arthritis..................
I would like to see a vaccine against ticks, potentially stopping many tick-borne diseases.
My body killed ticks for a while, and I’ve read about a few other people who did this.
Here’s some killer T cells with your dinner, tick, bwa ha ha ha.
Or whatever the mechanism is.
Some tick-borne diseases transmit in minutes, not hours like Lyme, so probably it wouldn’t be fast enough there.
The immune reaction at least lets you know you have a tick to remove, even if it doesn’t kill it. No under the radar little bloodsuckers.
Ixodes scapularis saliva components that elicit responses associated with acquired tick-resistance
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31924502/
On the West Coast, the Western Black-Legged Tick is the carrier. Red abdomen, black legs.
I’ll take my chances with Lyme disease
They’ve been supposedly trying out a vaccine in the ne. That was about 8 10 years or so ago- never heard if it was successful or not. Would be huge if it is successful as many people have outside jobs, and lots of folks just love the outdoors. Would be nice to not have to worry about tick bites like the good old days when kids could p,ay outside without fear of lymes or o e of the other tick infections. Growing up we never even heard of lymes disease. Now just going in a yard for a barbecue can ruin a person’s life if they get it and don’t realize it.
BTTT
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