Enterprise: Fighting Ticks, but Admiring Their Tenacity

Tiny arachnid legs writhe under a microscope in the lab of University of Maryland researcher Utpal Pal, who’s piecing together clues to one of medicine’s persistent puzzles: How do we stop ticks from making us sick?

Each year, nearly half a million people receive a diagnosis of Lyme disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention, with Maryland looming as a hot spot for infections. Many thousands more are infected with other diseases from ticks, second only to mosquitoes in the number of diseases they spread. 

Pal, a professor of veterinary medicine, and his team are probing the immune systems of parasites and their hosts in a bid to create vaccines and other disease prevention strategies. “That's what we're trying to understand … this tug-of-war between the host and the tick, so that we can identify some of the key elements that we can trigger in our advantage to deter tick feeding” and block the transfer of pathogens, Pal said.

Even as he fights this dangerous pest, Pal can’t help but marvel at a “living fossil” that has survived and thrived for hundreds of millions of years, despite lacking the agility and flying ability of many insects and other creepy-crawlies. “What is that robust ability to persist?” he said. “That's amazing.”

Join Maryland researchers as they explore the surprising science of one of nature's most successful survivors in the latest installment of "Enterprise: University of Maryland Research Stories."