Researchers at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University have created a test that allows the removal of the 8 most common pathogens transmitted by ticks.
These arachnids carry many diseases, and the tick-borne tests available on the market today are not sufficiently accurate and do not allow simultaneous analysis for more than one pathogen. This situation is to be changed by a test created by scientists from Columbia University.
Oaks, mice and humans
Ticks are one of the rows of arachnids. So far around 900 species of these animals have been discovered around the world. The most common tick species in Poland is the European tick (Ixodes ricinus). It can temporarily parasite on many species of animals, including rodents, dogs, cats, birds and humans. By changing the host, the tick can carry the disease. The most common tick-borne diseases in humans include Lyme disease, viral pneumonia, anaplasmosis, tick-borne encephalitis, babesiosis, tularemia, rickettsiosis or (recently known) neoehrlichiosis.
Researchers from the Department of Systematic Zoology, Faculty of Biology, University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań proved that there is a relationship between the seed years of oaks in Poland and the number of cases of Lyme disease. A larger number of acors in a given year means more food available for animals living in the forest, including forest mice. These rodents are very often carriers of Lyme borreliosis, which does not harm the mice too much. The tick-feeding mouse can move onto a man walking through the forest or meadow and infect it with Lyme disease. Poznań scholars have shown that it takes two years from the last seed year of oaks to increase the risk of Lyme disease in the population.
It is worth knowing that the last seminal year of oaks in Poland took place in 2016. Therefore, in the coming year we can expect an increased number of people suffering from Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases.
Inaccurate and laborious
Confirmation of tick-borne disease requires an appropriate test. The tests available on the market today that allow detection of Lyme disease, babesiosis, anaplasmosis, rickettsiosis or virus infections Powassan (POWV) and Heartland (HRTV) have limited accuracy and must be performed separately for each disease. Another problem is the high percentage of false positive results from these tests. In the case of Lyme disease, it is estimated that almost every third result may be falsified. In practice, this leads to the fact that only 40 percent of cases of Lyme disease are successfully detected at an early stage.
This situation was decided by American scientists from the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University. Their goal was to construct such a test that would allow the simultaneous detection of antibodies oriented against many types of pathogens carried by ticks and at the same time was more accurate than the techniques available on the market today. The results of their work on a new test called TBD Serochip were published in a prestigious journalScientific Reports.
8 in 1
Serochip TBD has been designed so that it can detect the 8 most common pathogens transmitted by ticks, namely:Anaplasma phagocytophilum, Babesia microti, Borrelia burgdorferi, Borrelia miyamotoi, Ehrlichia chaffeensis, Rickettsia rickettsii and POWV and HRTV viruses. Until now, tests for many of these pathogens have been performed only in selected centers, and the results between different laboratories could significantly differ between each other. The authors of the new test prove that the procedure they created is more accurate than the previous one, and this allows to shorten the test time - because instead of performing 8 different tests, the laboratory performs one.
At the same time, scientists promise that if there is a need, they can increase the number of types of antibodies sought. The addition of pathogens to the test is to be relatively simple, and the entire Serochip TBD modification procedure is expected to last approximately 4 weeks.
Based:
R. Tokarz et al.,A multiplex serologic platform for the diagnosis of tick-borne diseases. Scientific Reports 8 (2018) 3158
