Inner Workings: Lyme disease vaccines face familiar challenges, both societal and scientific
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Foto: The black-legged or deer tick (Ixodes scapularis) is responsible for transmitting Lyme disease in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and north-central United States. Image credit: Shutterstock/Steven Ellingson.
LYMErix was on the market for just four years. Concerns over adverse reactions and a lukewarm reception from public health agencies led the vaccine’s manufacturer, SmithKline Beecham, to shelve the product in 2002. Since then, the need for a vaccine has grown. An estimated 300,000 people are diagnosed with Lyme disease in the United States annually, and reported cases of the disease have tripled since the 1990s. In some counties in the northeast United States, disease incidence has increased more than 300% over a 20-year period. “The people who live along the northeast corridor among the Mississippi River valley have suffered greatly because there is no Lyme vaccine,” says Gregory Poland, a vaccine researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.
Now, a new round of Lyme disease vaccines is in development. European biotech company Valneva is in phase 2 clinical trials for a vaccine against six strains of Borrelia, which causes the disease in Europe and the United States. And researchers are working to develop a vaccine against Lyme disease based on a vaccine for dogs that was released in 2016. The pressure is on this time around to make the “perfect vaccine,” says immunologist Richard Marconi at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, one of the researchers working on the dog vaccine–inspired approach.
No doubt, concerns about the original vaccine are something drug developers and public health officials will have to grapple with as new vaccines strive for success. But although fears related to the original Lyme disease vaccine haven’t gone away, the science of vaccine development has changed significantly. Researchers are counting on that new science to put some of those fears to rest.
Still, despite ample promise—Valneva’s vaccine has obtained fast-track status from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—there’s no way to know for sure what sort of reception these new vaccines will receive from the public. “There will be one more shot at bringing a human Lyme vaccine to market,” says Marconi, “and if that vaccine fails, the market will essentially disappear.”
