Director’s Blog

We are trying something new and using this space to discuss interesting things we see going on in Lyme disease and at Tufts University. Although it is called the Director’sBlog, we plan to have a rotation of people joining to add their perspectives.

The holidays are always a great time to reflect and give thanks.  2025 was a game changing year for the Tufts Lyme Initiative.  It was the first year of our new NIH program project study, PROSSECO, which is devoted to understanding the causes of post treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS) by observing patients from their first diagnosis of Lyme and following them to either resolution or persistence of their symptoms.  Honestly, no one on our team had previously had experience with anything of this scale and we learned so much this year about how much was involved in setting up and running a clinical study.  We are forever indebted to the members of our clinical team here who worked tirelessly to get things in place in time for the start of the 2025 tick season.  Our external advisory board (EAB), which included leading researchers, patients and representatives from some of the largest Lyme biobanks in both the U.S. and abroad, was instrumental in making sure we were doing things with the best practices and in a way that would allow our data to be integrated with theirs.  We are also tremendously grateful to the private practices that were patient as we worked through growing pains and helped us to enroll over 90 patients acute Lyme disease in our first year.  And most of all we are grateful to the patients who have donated their time (and so much blood) to helping us understand PTLDS.

The Tufts Lyme Initiative continues to grow with 17 faculty members whose research is primarily devoted to tick-borne diseases.  We hope to have several more faculty to announce early in the new year!!   We also have some bittersweet departures.  We are bidding farewell to Dr. David Snydman who retired this year after a long career at Tufts Medical Center.  We also bid farewell to Dr. Jeff Bourgeois who finished his post-doctoral training and will be continuing his Lyme disease work at Worchester Polytechnical Institute as a tenure track Assistant Professor. 

Research from the Tufts Lyme Initiative group continues to go well with over 30 publications in 2025 and $50 million in active grants for tick-borne disease research.  Particular kudos to our star young investigator Dr. Peter Gwynne, who received a new grant from the Ellison Foundation to study the association of autoantibodies with PTLDS and Dr. Andy Camilli, whose primary research focus is on cholera and not Lyme disease, but who received a new NIH award to develop genetic tools to speed research on Lyme.  Finally, the $1,000,000 anonymous donation we received last year has been put to good use in developing new narrow spectrum antibiotics to be used in pre-exposure prophylaxis, reservoir targeted administration to clear infection in wild-life or in long-term trials of antibiotics in patients with PTLDS.  With over 50,000 compounds already screened and hundreds of potential new targets discovered, we are moving quickly to develop AI models to screen virtual compound libraries and generate the best drugs to move forward in development. 

Thanks everyone for a terrific 2025.  Here’s to looking forward to an even better 2026!!