Medical study is seeking people who may have tick immunity or resistance

Patrick Varine | Friday, July 24, 2020 9:48 a.m.

AP FILE/CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

A blacklegged tick, also known as a deer tick, a carrier of Lyme disease.

Jason Bobe is looking for a few of what he calls “medical superheroes.”

Bobe, an associate professor in the genetics and genome science department at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, is part of Mount Sinai’s Resilience Project. It seeks to find people who, despite high risk and repeated exposure to a particular illness, do not exhibit any symptoms.

The inspiration for the project was a New York City man named Stephen Crohn. Despite being exposed to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, repeatedly in the 1970s and ‘80s, Crohn never tested HIV-positive and never developed any AIDS symptoms.

“They found out he was resistant, but this was the 1990s and so they kind of had to guess what accounted for that resistance,” Bobe said. “We hadn’t mapped out the human genome yet, so they couldn’t go and look for a gene mutation.”

Crohn’s case led to the development of new medication to combat HIV and AIDS. Bobe is hoping for a similar outcome with regard to Lyme disease. He is seeking people who may have a resistance to either Lyme or a reaction to the ticks that carry it.

“There are two types of people we’re looking for,” Bobe said. “People like Stephen Crohn, who may have been exposed to Lyme disease, test positive, but don’t exhibit any sort of symptoms. There are also people who, when they’re bitten by a tick, they feel an itch or a pain.”

That’s not supposed to happen, Bobe said. The terrible effectiveness of ticks is their ability to feed without being noticed. Enzymes in their saliva serve to block pain receptors and reduce blood coagulation.

“If someone can feel that, and we can study their blood, we may be able to find an antibody that can be used to create a vaccine that keeps ticks from biting,” Bobe said.

The tricky part is finding them.

“Doctors see the non-resistant people all the time. But the folks who don’t get sick? They don’t go to the doctor,” Bobe said. “For someone like Stephen Crohn, he had to go and find the scientists. So my goal is to try and find these outliers and connect them with scientists.”

Pennsylvania is among the states with the highest rate of Lyme disease. Westmoreland County was the third-highest in the state in 2018, with 496 reported cases. Allegheny County had 404.

For more, see ResilienceProject.com.