NIH Grant Targets Tick-Borne Diseases

A University of Maryland-led team has been awarded a five-year, multimillion-dollar grant to unravel the complex biology of the deer tick and its role in transmitting Lyme disease and anaplasmosis, two of the most prevalent tick-borne diseases in the United States.

The grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will support the continuation of work led by Utpal Pal, a professor in the Department of Veterinary Medicine. He leads a multi-institutional team of researchers seeking to understand and leverage the unique molecular-level interactions between ticks and their hosts to develop potential vaccines and therapeutics.

Pal previously discovered that ticks don’t just passively carry disease-causing bacteria, but respond at a molecular level to signals from infected animals they feed on—the first discovery of a molecular communication system between two very different species that regulates key biological functions in one of them.

That study showed when a tick takes a blood meal, specific proteins and hormones in the host’s blood signal the tick that the host is infected with pathogens, which influences the tick’s development, as well as how it metabolizes meals, fights off microbes, and ultimately, how effectively it can transmit diseases.

The grant will enable researchers from Pal’s lab and partner institutions—the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Yale University and the University of Minnesota—to focus on understanding the molecular signaling pathways and to develop new, advanced genetic techniques to target key components of the pathways. The research may lead to innovative anti-tick vaccines that can block tick engorgement and pathogen transmission.

“By investigating these novel pathways, we aim to identify new ways to disrupt the tick’s life cycle and prevent the spread of diseases like Lyme disease and anaplasmosis,” Pal said.

As part of this initiative, the team will also develop new genetic tools for expanding this research; findings will be shared through open-source platforms that ensure their discoveries contribute to a broader scientific community and inspire new avenues of research.

“The ultimate goal of our study is twofold,” Pal said, “to deepen our understanding of tick molecular biology and to pave the way for innovative prevention strategies against Lyme disease and anaplasmosis.”