Posted on 05/01/2025 9:22:42 PM PDT by Red Badger
Deer ticks, like the one photographed, can carry Lyme disease/ (KPixMining/Shutterstock)
In a nutshell
* The antibiotic piperacillin has shown remarkable effectiveness against Lyme disease-causing bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, at doses 100 times lower than doxycycline, the current standard treatment.
* Unlike doxycycline, which affects beneficial gut bacteria, piperacillin targets only the Lyme bacteria without disrupting the microbiome, making it a safer option, especially for children and pregnant women.
* The discovery opens the door for piperacillin to be repurposed as a highly effective treatment for Lyme disease, potentially even as a single-dose preventive therapy after a tick bite. Further research is needed to confirm its effectiveness in larger animal studies.
****************************************************************************
EVANSTON, Ill. — For the half-million Americans facing Lyme disease each year, treatment often means taking antibiotics that ravage their gut microbiome and still fail 20% of patients. But an existing antibiotic could change everything. Scientists have just discovered that piperacillin destroys the Lyme-causing bacteria with sniper-like precision at dramatically lower doses than current treatments.
The widely-used antibiotic piperacillin eradicated Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete bacterium causing Lyme disease, at concentrations 100 times lower than doxycycline, the current standard treatment. This could address multiple problems with current Lyme disease treatments, including their failure in up to 20% of patients and inability to be used in young children and pregnant women.
Researchers from Virginia Tech and Northwestern University suggest piperacillin could give doctors another valuable option for treating Lyme disease, according to their study published in Science Translational Medicine.
A Growing Health Threat
Lyme disease, primarily transmitted through tick bites, has become an escalating health concern across the United States and Europe. If left untreated, the infection can spread to the heart, joints, and nervous system, causing serious complications. As tick populations expand their geographic range due to climate change and urbanization, cases continue to rise, making the need for effective treatments more urgent.
Human sweat contains a protein that may protect against Lyme disease, according to a study from MIT and the University of Helsinki
The research team employed an innovative drug screening approach to identify piperacillin’s exceptional effectiveness. Instead of measuring how the bacteria grow (which is tough because Lyme bacteria grow slowly), they focused on how the bacteria build their outer structure. This approach helped them test almost 500 approved drugs and find the ones that target Lyme bacteria in a unique way.
Why Piperacillin Stands Out From Current Treatments
Unlike doxycycline, which indiscriminately kills a wide range of bacteria including beneficial gut microbes, piperacillin at low doses specifically targets and kills B. burgdorferi while leaving other bacterial species untouched. This stems from piperacillin’s interaction with a specific protein involved in Lyme bacteria’s unusual multi-zonal growth pattern.
When mice infected with Lyme disease were treated with piperacillin, the antibiotic cleared the infection at doses 100 times lower than doxycycline. Also, while doxycycline treatment significantly disrupted the mice’s gut microbiome, piperacillin treatment at the effective dose had virtually no impact on gut bacteria.
Doxycycline’s broad-spectrum killing of gut bacteria can compromise immune function, something worth avoiding when fighting infection. Doxycycline also produces unwanted effects in human cells and cannot be prescribed to children under eight years of age or pregnant women.
Piperacillin’s Precision Attack
Piperacillin is already widely used to treat infections caused by other bacteria, though typically at much higher doses than what might be needed for Lyme disease. It could potentially be repurposed for Lyme disease treatment, possibly even as a single-dose preventative therapy after a suspected tick bite.
Before piperacillin becomes a clinical option for Lyme disease, further research is needed. Nevertheless, the discovery has the potential to be a safer, more targeted option that could help thousands who cannot take current treatments or for whom they fail. It also demonstrates the value of repurposing existing medications, a strategy that can accelerate bringing treatments to patients by bypassing many required development and safety testing steps.
Piperacillin, a medication doctors have prescribed for decades, may soon offer Lyme patients a treatment that targets only what harms them while preserving what helps them heal. Science might finally be catching up to the tiny disease vectors we call ticks.
Paper Summary
Methodology
The researchers used a comprehensive screening approach to identify potential new treatments for Lyme disease from FDA-approved compounds. Rather than using traditional methods that measure bacterial growth (which are difficult with the slow-growing Lyme bacteria), they monitored peptidoglycan synthesis—an essential component of bacterial cell walls—using a fluorescent marker. They screened 466 FDA-approved compounds at 100 nM concentration against Borrelia burgdorferi cultures, then conducted counter-screens against other bacterial species to identify compounds with Lyme-specific activity. The most promising candidate, piperacillin, was further tested in laboratory experiments to determine its mechanism of action and minimum inhibitory concentration. Finally, the researchers tested piperacillin in mice infected with B. burgdorferi, comparing its effectiveness to doxycycline (the standard treatment) and analyzing its impact on the gut microbiome through 16S rRNA sequencing.
Results
Piperacillin emerged as exceptionally effective against B. burgdorferi at very low concentrations (minimum inhibitory concentration of 35 nM or 0.018 mg/mL), killing the bacteria 10-200 times more effectively than doxycycline. Laboratory studies revealed that piperacillin specifically targets BB0136, a protein involved in B. burgdorferi‘s unusual cell division process, with extremely high affinity (IC50 of 20.5 nM). In mouse studies, piperacillin at just 1 mg/kg/day was as effective as doxycycline at 100 mg/kg/day in clearing the infection. Importantly, while doxycycline significantly disrupted the gut microbiome, piperacillin at its effective dose had virtually no impact on gut bacteria. No viable bacteria were recovered from mice treated with piperacillin even eight weeks after treatment ended, suggesting complete eradication of the infection.
Limitations
The researchers acknowledge several limitations. The study primarily used needle inoculation rather than tick transmission of the bacteria, which might affect results. They did not perform xenodiagnoses (using ticks to detect residual infection) and did not test treatment after extremely long infection periods. The authors need to test the treatment in larger animals and to evaluate its effectiveness against persistent forms of the bacteria. Beta-lactam antibiotics like piperacillin theoretically only work on actively replicating bacteria, which might limit effectiveness against dormant forms if they exist in Lyme disease. Finally, piperacillin has relatively short persistence in the bloodstream (45-70 minute half-life in humans), which could affect clinical applications.
Funding and Disclosures
The research was funded in part by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, USDA (VA-160113), National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease (R01AI173256, R01AI178711), the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, and Global Lyme Alliance. No conflicts of interest were disclosed.
Publication Information
The paper titled “A comprehensive, high-resolution screen identifies and validates a pre-existing beta-lactam that specifically treats Lyme disease” was published in Science Translational Medicine. It was authored by Maegan E. Gabby, Abey Bandara, Lea M. Outrata, Osamudiamen Ebohon, Saadman Ahmad, Jules M. Dressler, Mecaila E. McClune, Lainey Mullins, and Brandon L. Jutras from Virginia Tech’s Department of Biochemistry, Fralin Life Science Institute, and Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-borne Pathogens, as well as Northwestern University’s Department of Microbiology-Immunology and Human Center for Immunobiology.
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Ping!.......................
Old school Amoxycillin took care of mine lickety-split 27 years ago with no side effects. I was living in the heavily wooded village of Hampton, CT. Not far from Lyme itself.
Some people believe Lyme Disease is a man-made disease........ala CIA........
That’s bunk. The only way they could do that is if the did a “gain of function” research trying to make a tick disease that would spread and that doesn’t sound . . . The dirty dogs. It does sound like something they would do.
Despite its name, pipercillin can be taken by people who are allergic to amoxicillin and other “cillins”. It’s good to know for people like me who are allergic to doxycycline and cillins.
Bfl
Excellent news ping
Um...Ok.
Key passage:
IN MICE.
And piperacillin’s side effects are NOT well researched.
Don’t know about cia, but absolutely, positively a lab leak (intentional or otherwise).
Years ago the people of Lyme CT decided the rattlesnakes all had to die, despite them living in the middle of nowhere so they slaughtered them.
Rattlesnakes are the predators of Deer and White Footed mice who are the main carriers of the nymph stage of deer ticks.
Without them the stage of tick development dead-ends.
Rattlesnakes all gone, the mice flourished unchecked.
Endemic became pandemic
Brilliant people up there.
😑
What if you can’t tolerate penicillin?
Is different enough to not affect you?
I grew up hunting, fishing, living outdoors may through november. Never even saw a tic until about ten years ago.
Great news!
White footed mice, OK, but deer? Really?
Thanks, RB. I find it interesting how these screenings of existing antibiotics take place. The researchers started with almost 500 existing drugs. That’s a lot of work.
The author wrote “It also demonstrates the value of repurposing existing medications, a strategy that can accelerate bringing treatments to patients by bypassing many required development and safety testing steps.”
Where was that not allowed? Oh, yeah, Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine during COVID. We were emphatically told “Do not use - they do not work” yet study after study showed their effectiveness. Repurposing drugs to fight COVID was verboten, yet repurposing drugs for Lyme Disease and other diseases is normal practice and encouraged. That exposed the corruption in the government-medical industry combine.
Some people believe the Earth is flat and covered by an impenetrable dome. Some people believe that the Earth is hollow and there’s an entrance to the interior at the North Pole. Some people believe that Antarctica is an ice wall beyond which are other worlds we’re not allowed to visit.
I’ll take #3.....................
I’ve had several bouts of Lyme. The last was by far the worst, because it was a double infection with both Lyme and babeosis (a kind of American Malaria). Because it was a double infection, the doxycycline didn’t work and and I kept getting sicker (lost 30% of my red blood cells) until the blood tests figured it out. The bummer here is that you have to be sick for about 2 weeks for the blood tests to indicate that these parasites are what is causing your illnessl
Those friggin’ ticks are a real scourge where I live, on Cape Cod. I hear they are worse on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
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