15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test

A new 15-minute at-home test called LymeAlert allows users to quickly test ticks for Lyme disease, potentially reducing unnecessary doctor visits and antibiotic use.

Just because you’ve been bitten by a tick, it doesn’t mean you’re going to contract Lyme disease. After all, the tick might not be a carrier.

Wouldn’t it be good to know, before racing to an emergency room? That’s why laboratories throughout the United States will test ticks for Lyme disease and various other infections these bugs may carry. You can expect to pay anywhere from $50 to $450 and wait a week or more for results.

But soon you’ll be able to run a 15-minute tick test in your living room. It’s called LymeAlert, and it’s due to go on sale in August, priced at $40 per test.

Company founder Erin Dawicki, a pediatric orthopedic physician assistant, came up with the concept while working toward an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I went to MIT because I was getting so angry at the US healthcare system,” Dawicki said, “because it forces me to treat people differently based on their insurance status and that’s their socioeconomic status. And frankly, that goes against my ethical framework.”

She figured that an MIT degree would help her find technological solutions to even out health care disparities. “I thought I was going to work on health care reform at the federal level,” Dawicki said. “Clearly, the universe had other plans.

Instead, she was “dragged kicking and screaming” into a course on health care entrepreneurship. Arriving two weeks after the course had begun, she was assigned to come up with a product to improve the treatment of Lyme disease. But she wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Dawicki’s breakthrough came to her in the shower. “I get phone calls all the time from my patients,” she thought. “Hey, I found a tick on me. What do I do?”

Usually, Dawicki told them to come in and get a dose of an anti-Lyme antibiotic, just in case. But while over half of ticks in Massachusetts carry Lyme disease, nearly half do not. An unnecessary doctor visit costs money, and unnecessary doses of antibiotics increase the risk that diseases will become more resistant to the drug.

Why not test the tick first? Just like that, Dawicki had her class project. When she suggested it in class, four fellow students offered to pitch in. So did Dawicki’s husband, a mechanical engineer.

The result is LymeAlert. The test is painless for humans, but hard on ticks. It comes with a plastic container and a built-in grinder. A user drops up to five ticks into the container, then closes and twists it, grinding the ticks into pulp. Next, the user inserts a piece of chemically treated paper, which changes color if Lyme disease bacteria are present.

“For the people who find a tick, and it’s positive, we can give them one dose of antibiotic and have a pretty good chance of preventing the disease,” Dawicki said.

It’s good news if it works, said Armin Alaedini, chief scientific officer of the Global Lyme Alliance, a nonprofit seeking cures for the disease. A quick, simple Lyme test could give bite victims a head start on getting antibiotics. But “if it’s not a good test and it gives false positives, it can be misleading and it could cause panic,” Alaedini said.

In addition, he noted that the test won’t reveal whether the tick is carrying other infectious agents, such as the tick-borne substance that causes Alpha-gal syndrome. “The best thing is to go see a doctor when you get that tick bite,” Alaedini said.

Dawicki concedes that LymeAlert can’t test for every possible hazard. She said the company is working on a future version capable of detecting other pathogens, and hopes to bring it to market next year.

In the meantime, she said, it’s especially important to get a head start on treating Lyme disease because it’s the only major tick-borne infection that can be treated with an antibiotic before it becomes serious. Besides, infectious disease experts say that the antibiotic should be administered within 72 hours of detecting the tick.

Helping infected people is just the beginning. LymeAlert will also offer a smartphone app that enables users to anonymously report the locations where infected ticks are found.

“We’re refining those ticks down to the neighborhood level,” Dawicki said, “and then we’re overlaying that with NASA satellite data and migratory animal data to do an AI predictive algorithm of where different tick species and different pathogens are likely to spread.”

In short, she’s putting ticks under surveillance in hopes of leaving Lyme disease with nowhere to hide.

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