EMERY COWAN Sun Staff Reporter
Jun 15, 2016

It started with an email from a mother whose 24-year-old daughter had struggled for years to overcome intense Lyme disease.

After five years shuttling her daughter to doctor visits across the country and intense antibiotic treatments to battle the Lyme, Tammy Crawford got in touch with Paul Keim, director of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff. Knowing the institute’s experience using genetic sequencing to identify pathogens like tuberculosis and E. coli, Crawford asked if TGen could do the same for Lyme disease.

Keim agreed to give it a try, and Crawford wrote TGen a $75,000 check through her recently created nonprofit Focus on Lyme to get started.

Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme, is sneaky, hiding in the body’s cartilage instead of the blood, which makes it much harder to detect, Keim said. Current diagnostic tests are just 50 percent accurate.

But less than a year after TGen took on the project, Keim said the team has developed the test, and has already received promising initial results. Next, researchers will begin using human blood samples to verify the accuracy of the diagnostic process.

An undercover pathogen

SNIP