How mRNA technology could create a new vaccine — against ticks

Climate change, a negative force for so many types of native flora and fauna in the U.S., has been an enormously positive development for ticks. As temperatures rise across the nation, more of the U.S. has become hospitable to ticks, and the prevalence of diseases carried by ticks has increased. Approximately 500,000 Americans are now diagnosed with Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne disease, annually — double the number of cases reported in the 1990s. Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a previously rare bacterial disease that can cause fever, rash, headache and, in very severe cases, death in humans, is on the rise. So is babesiosis, a parasite that infects red blood cells and causes malaria-like symptoms.

Right now, there is no coordinated national response, as there is for sexually transmitted diseases or COVID-19, to tick-borne disease in the U.S. State health departments are required to report cases of Lyme and some other tick-borne illnesses to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but the burden of protecting oneself from ticks and seeking out a diagnosis and treatment for a tick-borne illness is still shouldered almost entirely by individuals. 

A vaccine against tick-borne illnesses would help alleviate some of that burden. But prior attempts to distribute such a vaccine have failed spectacularly. A moderately effective vaccine for Lyme disease, called LYMErix, was used in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but its manufacturers withdrew it after just a few years on the market after a lawsuit from a group that claimed the vaccine caused arthritis problems, despite negligible evidence that it did anything of the sort. The saga had a chilling effect on tick vaccine research for decades. 

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