7 ms·

Summary: the tests were conducted on guinea pigs because they can develop immune reactions to repeated tick bites like humans do. Mice do not seem to be suited

Summary: the tests were conducted on guinea pigs because they can develop immune reactions to repeated tick bites like humans do. Mice do not seem to be suited for that for once. The vaccine was administered intradermally. It consists of nucleoside-modified mRNA encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles like we know them from Covid vaccines already. The contained mRNA sequences encode 19 different proteins that are usually found in the saliva of a particular kind of tick in the US. These proteins were selected because of prior research it was known that they seemed to cause inflammatory reactions in the host. The inflammatory reaction that occured at the site of the tick bite hampered feeding of the ticks and reduced risk of disease transmission. The vaccine mostly seems to buy more time to remove the ticks before an infection can take place because the disease causing bacteria was not directly targeted by the vaccine.

SamBam 5y ago
Interesting. At first I figured the title was misleading — surely they meant an anti-Lyme disease vaccination — but it turns out that, no, they mean exactly that: anti-tick. They're training the immune system to recognize the tick saliva. This means that the immune system would recognize the bite much quicker, attack anything associated with it, and in general activate the body's innate immune system faster, leading to a faster response by the adaptive immune system. In their trials on hamsters, none of the hamsters with the vaccine got Lyme disease, even though it wasn't a vaccine directly targeting Lyme.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  That sounds amazing! The irony is, in the United States at least, a tick-proofing vaccine would be most useful in areas where the population has a relatively dim perspective on mRNA vaccines.
  - chrononaut 5y ago
    > The irony is, in the United States at least, a tick-proofing vaccine would be most useful in areas where the population has a relatively dim perspective on mRNA vaccines. In what sense? The states most affected by Lyme[0] are generally the most (COVID-19) vaccinated in the US[1] [0] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/datasurveillance/maps-recent.html https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/datasurveillance/maps-recent.html [1] https://covidactnow.org/?s=27521640 https://covidactnow.org/?s=27521640
    - sdenton4 5y ago
      States aren't homogeneous, though, and rural people in blue states can be extra over the top in their performative Trumpism. For example, there's a good case to be made that California Republicans are much more focused on performative Trumpism than on actually winning elections.
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        There’s different cohorts of trumpists. Remember that he’s a demagogue/personality cult figure, with an orbit of parasites adjacent to him. Rural people are lowercase conservative in general, but his real power base are blue collar low information nihilists. They see his vulgarity as “straight talk”. But the man isn’t conservative. Somebody will figure out how to divide and conquer those groups.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      Antivax for COVID is different, as it became a political sports contest. Usually the groups who have low vaccination rates are more extreme religious groups. It’s usually not a big deal from a broader population perspective - the exception being measles.
      - mc32 5y ago
        Oddly we had the current President and VP also saying they’d never take a Trump vaccine[1]. So it’s truly very political for many people and not complete science based even when now they claim to adhere to science. To wit: September 6, 2020: Kamala Harris says "I think that's going to be an issue" when asked if she would get an approved coronavirus vaccine. July 28, 2020: Joe Biden suggests the coronavirus vaccine won't be "real" and may not be "safe." August 6, 2020: Biden says the vaccine is "not likely to go through all the tests that needs to be and the trials that are needed to be done." September 3, 2020: Biden asks "Who's going to take the shot? Are you going to be the first one to say sign me up?" September 7, 2020: Biden said he would take the coronavirus vaccine "only if we knew all of what went into it." [1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-press-release-fact-kamala-harriss-anti-vaccine-rhetoric-anti-science-and https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-press-rel...
  - lurquer 5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Ridiculous. Among others, urban residents who enjoy rural hikes and suburban residents who walk their dogs are all at risk from tick bites. I’ve personally been bitten by ticks more times than I can count, and ditto for my dog. Edit: and yes I know how to prevent bites, but sometimes when you’re in the US South and hiking on a hot summer day you let your guard down.
  - jliptzin 5y ago
    That’s fine, Lyme isn’t contagious like covid is. If someone doesn’t want the vaccine they’re only putting themselves at risk.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Since the COVID vaccines don't seem to really prevent transmission or infection, I think the same is true for those.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        Some Covid vaccines reduce transmission. And it keeps you out of the hospital, which for a human-to-human transmissible disease like Covid (and unlike Lyme’s), is a big deal.
      - rsynnott 5y ago
        Vaccines do reduce transmission, via (a) reducing the chance of becoming infected in the first place and (b) reducing the average duration of the infectious period. As far as anyone can tell, this holds up for omicron, at least for boosted individuals, though it's certainly less effective at preventing infection.
    - abeyer 5y ago
      Unless they create a coordinated campaign to oppose an already approved Lyme vaccine to such a degree that the manufacturers think it's too much of a risk to leave it on the market.
      - PierceJoy 5y ago
        In case others think you’ve stated a hypothetical, let’s be clear that this already happened.
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      But they might require hospitalization or other medical treatment, increasing the strain on the healthcare system resulting in worse outcomes for others.
  - pridkett 5y ago
    It’s fun to say that, and it may be partially true, but Lyme disease is very prevalent in the Northeast United States. If you spend time outside in Connecticut, you’ll eventually find a bite in you with the tell tale circle. Yes, uptake may not be 100%, but even in “rural” New England, vaccination rates are very high.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  There indeed are people whose immune systems will attack and kill ticks. https://eu.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/health/lyme-disease/2015/08/01/how-one-local-mans-immunity-ticks-could-save-us-all/30578799/ https://eu.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/health/lyme-di...
- hedgehog 5y ago
  There is also interesting preliminary work on mRNA for Malaria and various bigger parasites (hookworms etc), along with traditional long-term foes like HIV, RSV, herpes family, etc.
- yosito 5y ago
  > the immune system would recognize the bite much quicker, attack anything associated with it How does this mechanism work? I once had a doctor suggest that I may have developed a food allergy due to some kind of co-exposure event. Why doesn't this happen with vaccines, for example, that anything we are exposed to the same day we get a vaccine we are at risk of developing an allergy to?
  - aardvarkr 5y ago
    Last I heard there wasn’t a scientific answer for why some people developed food allergies like a red meat allergy after a tick based infection so that theory would be pure speculation on the doctor’s part. I’m not a doctor and this information may be old so take it with a grain of salt
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      The allergy is specifically to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, a very common carbohydrate that occurs in both the meat of domesticated ungulates and the saliva of ticks, but which is not produced by primates. The idea is that tick bites initiate an exaggerated immune response, but more study is required.
johnchristopher 5y ago
Question (from a regular joe): is the platform used for mRNA vaccines interchangeable ? Same design and fabrication process, but different payloads ? Or do different mRNA material imply different lipid shells ?
- OnACoffeeBreak 5y ago
  An answer from a regular Joe based on this fine write-up describing how the Pfizer mRNA vaccine is put together: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... My understanding is that the mRNA payload codes for specific protein production and the lipid envelope is there to protect the fragile mRNA payload during storage and delivery.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    Thanks, nice article. Don't get why your post is down voted though.
- DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
  Yes. The ‘platform’ is like a notebook in a ziplock bag. Write the code for $VACCINE in the notebook, place it in the bag, give it to a person. Very interchangeable. Source: I work in the field.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    At some point I read that it was useless to release IP on the vaccine itself because the fabrication process is way more complicated and has way more patents on it. Is that true ?
    - DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
      I think the best way to describe the situation is akin to cooking. Imagine the best chef in the world, Michelin stars and all. Would a written recipe of a 10 course meal result in the same final product? How about a video of the full preparation? How about if you went into the kitchen and shadowed them for a few hours? At what point would you feel confident in your ability to replicate the chef's final product? Would you then be considered the best chef in the world? How much of the chef's time would you like to take away from serving at their restaurant to training new chefs? What if it was in the middle of Friday night dinner rush? What if that dinner rush was 2 years long and instead of people being hungry, people were dying? These are the questions I don't see anyone wrestling with in these discussions. Would you trust the expert chef to train new chef's themselves? Or have some outside person, say a bbq expert chef, simply read our above example chef's notes and go for it? This isn't like high school science where you follow a protocol and out comes a thing. You can't even see the thing you're making! What about instead of taste, you had to rely on touch only to decide if the whole thing was identical (i.e., the analytics are just as complex as the manufacturing). Making these vaccines is much more akin to cooking because the platform/technology is so new. It took decades for biosimilar antibodies to be approved. Note they don't call them generics--because the product is so complex the process is the product. This was also because the number of experts able to start up new manufacturing took time to get expertly trained. I would trust the chef to scale-up their apprentices to ensure Quality (with a capital Q) instead of an obviously smart expert chef from some other field to just read the recipe and go for it.
ianbicking 5y ago
I wonder if the inflammatory response would also make the person more aware of the tick, increasing the likelihood the tick is removed promptly
- macNchz 5y ago
  This is definitely the case for me at least. I spent a lot of time in the New England woods as a kid and had lots of tick bites. Nowadays I am more cautious, but when I occasionally do get a bite I have a strong reaction at the site and usually find the tick very quickly that way because it’s itchy and inflamed. Some further reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3294369/#!po=1.11111 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3294369/#!po=1....
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    I don't know if I just taste bad to ticks or if I'm just lucky. I always find them just crawling around on me without ever tunneling in. Which is good because that is just a horrifying thought. (Live rural Southern Ontario, have both dog and black legged ticks here). I once had a dream that a tick was on me, and woke in the middle of night to find ticks on the back of my neck. Yowza.

SamBam 5y ago

Interesting. At first I figured the title was misleading — surely they meant an anti-Lyme disease vaccination — but it turns out that, no, they mean exactly that: anti-tick. They're training the immune system to recognize the tick saliva. This means that the immune system would recognize the bite much quicker, attack anything associated with it, and in general activate the body's innate immune system faster, leading to a faster response by the adaptive immune system. In their trials on hamsters, none of the hamsters with the vaccine got Lyme disease, even though it wasn't a vaccine directly targeting Lyme.

Eric_WVGG 5y ago
That sounds amazing! The irony is, in the United States at least, a tick-proofing vaccine would be most useful in areas where the population has a relatively dim perspective on mRNA vaccines.
- chrononaut 5y ago
  > The irony is, in the United States at least, a tick-proofing vaccine would be most useful in areas where the population has a relatively dim perspective on mRNA vaccines. In what sense? The states most affected by Lyme[0] are generally the most (COVID-19) vaccinated in the US[1] [0] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/datasurveillance/maps-recent.html https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/datasurveillance/maps-recent.html [1] https://covidactnow.org/?s=27521640 https://covidactnow.org/?s=27521640
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    States aren't homogeneous, though, and rural people in blue states can be extra over the top in their performative Trumpism. For example, there's a good case to be made that California Republicans are much more focused on performative Trumpism than on actually winning elections.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      There’s different cohorts of trumpists. Remember that he’s a demagogue/personality cult figure, with an orbit of parasites adjacent to him. Rural people are lowercase conservative in general, but his real power base are blue collar low information nihilists. They see his vulgarity as “straight talk”. But the man isn’t conservative. Somebody will figure out how to divide and conquer those groups.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Antivax for COVID is different, as it became a political sports contest. Usually the groups who have low vaccination rates are more extreme religious groups. It’s usually not a big deal from a broader population perspective - the exception being measles.
    - mc32 5y ago
      Oddly we had the current President and VP also saying they’d never take a Trump vaccine[1]. So it’s truly very political for many people and not complete science based even when now they claim to adhere to science. To wit: September 6, 2020: Kamala Harris says "I think that's going to be an issue" when asked if she would get an approved coronavirus vaccine. July 28, 2020: Joe Biden suggests the coronavirus vaccine won't be "real" and may not be "safe." August 6, 2020: Biden says the vaccine is "not likely to go through all the tests that needs to be and the trials that are needed to be done." September 3, 2020: Biden asks "Who's going to take the shot? Are you going to be the first one to say sign me up?" September 7, 2020: Biden said he would take the coronavirus vaccine "only if we knew all of what went into it." [1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-press-release-fact-kamala-harriss-anti-vaccine-rhetoric-anti-science-and https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-press-rel...
- lurquer 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jdavis703 5y ago
  Ridiculous. Among others, urban residents who enjoy rural hikes and suburban residents who walk their dogs are all at risk from tick bites. I’ve personally been bitten by ticks more times than I can count, and ditto for my dog. Edit: and yes I know how to prevent bites, but sometimes when you’re in the US South and hiking on a hot summer day you let your guard down.
- jliptzin 5y ago
  That’s fine, Lyme isn’t contagious like covid is. If someone doesn’t want the vaccine they’re only putting themselves at risk.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Since the COVID vaccines don't seem to really prevent transmission or infection, I think the same is true for those.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      Some Covid vaccines reduce transmission. And it keeps you out of the hospital, which for a human-to-human transmissible disease like Covid (and unlike Lyme’s), is a big deal.
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      Vaccines do reduce transmission, via (a) reducing the chance of becoming infected in the first place and (b) reducing the average duration of the infectious period. As far as anyone can tell, this holds up for omicron, at least for boosted individuals, though it's certainly less effective at preventing infection.
  - abeyer 5y ago
    Unless they create a coordinated campaign to oppose an already approved Lyme vaccine to such a degree that the manufacturers think it's too much of a risk to leave it on the market.
    - PierceJoy 5y ago
      In case others think you’ve stated a hypothetical, let’s be clear that this already happened.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    But they might require hospitalization or other medical treatment, increasing the strain on the healthcare system resulting in worse outcomes for others.
- pridkett 5y ago
  It’s fun to say that, and it may be partially true, but Lyme disease is very prevalent in the Northeast United States. If you spend time outside in Connecticut, you’ll eventually find a bite in you with the tell tale circle. Yes, uptake may not be 100%, but even in “rural” New England, vaccination rates are very high.
inglor_cz 5y ago
There indeed are people whose immune systems will attack and kill ticks. https://eu.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/health/lyme-disease/2015/08/01/how-one-local-mans-immunity-ticks-could-save-us-all/30578799/ https://eu.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/health/lyme-di...
hedgehog 5y ago
There is also interesting preliminary work on mRNA for Malaria and various bigger parasites (hookworms etc), along with traditional long-term foes like HIV, RSV, herpes family, etc.
yosito 5y ago
> the immune system would recognize the bite much quicker, attack anything associated with it How does this mechanism work? I once had a doctor suggest that I may have developed a food allergy due to some kind of co-exposure event. Why doesn't this happen with vaccines, for example, that anything we are exposed to the same day we get a vaccine we are at risk of developing an allergy to?
- aardvarkr 5y ago
  Last I heard there wasn’t a scientific answer for why some people developed food allergies like a red meat allergy after a tick based infection so that theory would be pure speculation on the doctor’s part. I’m not a doctor and this information may be old so take it with a grain of salt
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    The allergy is specifically to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, a very common carbohydrate that occurs in both the meat of domesticated ungulates and the saliva of ticks, but which is not produced by primates. The idea is that tick bites initiate an exaggerated immune response, but more study is required.

johnchristopher 5y ago

Question (from a regular joe): is the platform used for mRNA vaccines interchangeable ? Same design and fabrication process, but different payloads ? Or do different mRNA material imply different lipid shells ?

OnACoffeeBreak 5y ago
An answer from a regular Joe based on this fine write-up describing how the Pfizer mRNA vaccine is put together: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... My understanding is that the mRNA payload codes for specific protein production and the lipid envelope is there to protect the fragile mRNA payload during storage and delivery.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Thanks, nice article. Don't get why your post is down voted though.
DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
Yes. The ‘platform’ is like a notebook in a ziplock bag. Write the code for $VACCINE in the notebook, place it in the bag, give it to a person. Very interchangeable. Source: I work in the field.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  At some point I read that it was useless to release IP on the vaccine itself because the fabrication process is way more complicated and has way more patents on it. Is that true ?
  - DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
    I think the best way to describe the situation is akin to cooking. Imagine the best chef in the world, Michelin stars and all. Would a written recipe of a 10 course meal result in the same final product? How about a video of the full preparation? How about if you went into the kitchen and shadowed them for a few hours? At what point would you feel confident in your ability to replicate the chef's final product? Would you then be considered the best chef in the world? How much of the chef's time would you like to take away from serving at their restaurant to training new chefs? What if it was in the middle of Friday night dinner rush? What if that dinner rush was 2 years long and instead of people being hungry, people were dying? These are the questions I don't see anyone wrestling with in these discussions. Would you trust the expert chef to train new chef's themselves? Or have some outside person, say a bbq expert chef, simply read our above example chef's notes and go for it? This isn't like high school science where you follow a protocol and out comes a thing. You can't even see the thing you're making! What about instead of taste, you had to rely on touch only to decide if the whole thing was identical (i.e., the analytics are just as complex as the manufacturing). Making these vaccines is much more akin to cooking because the platform/technology is so new. It took decades for biosimilar antibodies to be approved. Note they don't call them generics--because the product is so complex the process is the product. This was also because the number of experts able to start up new manufacturing took time to get expertly trained. I would trust the chef to scale-up their apprentices to ensure Quality (with a capital Q) instead of an obviously smart expert chef from some other field to just read the recipe and go for it.

ianbicking 5y ago

I wonder if the inflammatory response would also make the person more aware of the tick, increasing the likelihood the tick is removed promptly

macNchz 5y ago
This is definitely the case for me at least. I spent a lot of time in the New England woods as a kid and had lots of tick bites. Nowadays I am more cautious, but when I occasionally do get a bite I have a strong reaction at the site and usually find the tick very quickly that way because it’s itchy and inflamed. Some further reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3294369/#!po=1.11111 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3294369/#!po=1....
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  I don't know if I just taste bad to ticks or if I'm just lucky. I always find them just crawling around on me without ever tunneling in. Which is good because that is just a horrifying thought. (Live rural Southern Ontario, have both dog and black legged ticks here). I once had a dream that a tick was on me, and woke in the middle of night to find ticks on the back of my neck. Yowza.