As a scientist with Lyme disease, the early years of my illness were distinguished by a frustrating lack of information in the published literature. I had to really dig to find relevant literature, and what literature there was seemed minimalistic, narrow, and or contradictory with either my own experience or other articles. The doctors most skilled at treating Lyme disease were (for the most part) not researchers, and the researchers were (for the most part) not listening to the patients or those doctors.
Skip forward a decade, and boy have things changed. While many of the researchers I mention were doing their research even in 2006, the body of work has grown in a satisfying and very extensive fashion. In addition, several Lyme specific funding agencies exist including the Bay Area Lyme Disease Foundation, the Lyme Disease Association, Lymedisease.org, and the Lyme Research Alliance, and the Dr. Paul Duray Research Fellowship Endowment, Inc. Not only are these agencies helping to fund critical research, but they are beginning to find ways to encourage new people to study Lyme disease. For example, Stanford Medical School has formed theLyme disease working group to study Lyme disease thanks to the work of the Stand4Lyme foundation
I want to highlight some of the people whose work is worth watching:
Dr. Eva Sapi, associate professor at the University of New Haven, was a biologist and cancer researcher who contracted Lyme disease in 2002. She eventually abandoned her cancer research to study Lyme disease. She has published about different strains of Borrelia’s in-vitro response to antibiotics (basic research that will eventually help to guide treatment); studied the role of Borrelia in Morgellon’s disease, studied the formation of biofilms by Borrelia, and most recently developed improved methods for cultivating Borrelia (again, critical basic research that will help with testing and proof that Borrelia was not just present in the past, which antibodies show, but is currently living in the body). She has also helped with first steps toward exploring whether or not Borrelia can be transmitted sexually (a question this blog also considers) by showing that Borrelia can be present in vaginal fluids and semen along with Ralph Stricker.
Dr. Raphael Stricker is an Internal Medicine specialist in private practice. His research experience originated in the 1980s, when he was an HIV researcher associated with the University of California School of Medicine. After a lengthy break, he started doing Lyme research in 2002, and has over 60 published articles on Lyme disease, co-infections, and Morgellons. Some of his articles are highly specific, dealing with topics such as musical hallucinations and optic neuritis. Others tackle critical issues such as the use of long-term antibiotics. Still others help to address the lyme wars head on, including his work on guidelines, the patient-reported impacts of Lyme disease on quality of life, gender bias in lyme disease, and sexual transmission.
Lorraine Johnson, J.D., M.B.A. is the executive director of the Lyme Disease Association (LDA), a lawyer, a blogger on Lyme policy, and an advocate for all of us. She regularly conducts surveys through LDA’s network of patients, along with the broader network of people on the state-by-state Lyme mailing lists. This group of patients represents primarily those with chronic Lyme disease. She often collaborates with Dr. Stricker and I have been lucky enough to co-author with her as well. Some of her works includes a review article on Chronic Lyme and an article on the severity of symptoms compared to other chronic diseases and a meta-analysis of cases demonstrating persistent infection post treatment.
Dr. Brian Fallon is a professor of Psychiatry in the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, where he directs the Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases Research Center, which I believe is one of the the first if not the first center associated with a major medical research university to explore issues relating to persistent symptoms and longer-term treatments (including a meta-analysis of 4 published studies which became famous during the recent case between the connecticut attorney general and the IDSA about their guidelines), including psychiatric manifestations of lyme, changes in the brain associated with persistent lyme symptoms. He is on the advisory board of the Lyme Disease Association, and his bio there nicely sums up more recent work of the center, not all of which I could find publications for, on topics such as identifying a more sensitive Lyme Western blot, identifying unique proteins associated with Lyme encephalopathy (but not chronic fatigue syndrome or healthy controls), post-mortem studies of patients with chronic Lyme symptoms and identifying of biomarkers to help guide treatment recommendations.
Dr. Monica Embers (faculty at the Tulane National Primate Research Center, and one of several researchers funded by the Bay Area Lyme Disease Foundation), along with Dr. Barthold and others studied persistent infection using monkeys. This allowed them to study persistence in ways that are not possible in human patients. Lorraine Johnston summarizes the implications for treatment and explores why this study was published 12 years after a parallel study by Wormser (of humans) in her policy blog. Dr. Embers also studies a variety of other topics including how Borrelia evades the immune system, the impact of slow growth rates of Borrelia on its persistence in the presence of antibiotics and the history, pros and cons of vaccination strategies.
Dr. Alan MacDonald runs the Dr. Paul Durray Research Fellowship Endowment. He has worked on issues such as long term persistence, but some of his most unique and impactful work focuses on the impact of Borrelia on the brain, including work on Alzheimer’s disease and the possibility that associated plaques are actually caused by Borrelia; Dementia and the presence of spirochetes; MS and its relationship to Lyme disease; and Borrelia biofilms.
I am certain that this is an incomplete list, and for example it does not touch on the set of people who have been instrumental in writing treatment guidelines, nor does it highlight most of the research on Lyme in animals who can get it (e.g., dogs), studies of how Lyme spreads in the ecosystem, and so on. That said, I encourage you to keep an eye on the work of these outstanding researchers. We are lucky to have them, and their work spans the gamut from test-tube studies to surveys of patients to field studies of treatments.
