A chance encounter while gardening changed the trajectory of Dr. Vett Lloyd’s career as a biologist and turned her into a leader in the fight against Lyme disease.
Dr. Lloyd spent the first part of her career studying genetics. Then in 2010, she got bitten by a tick in her yard, acquired Lyme disease, and became very ill. Her experience led her to investigate the way ticks carry the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. What she thought would be a “small little project” has turned into her life’s work.
On the Mount Allison Campus, Lloyd and her team are now working with an industry partner, Geneticks, to help Canadians protect themselves from the growing threat of Lyme disease. Their latest project is developing a mobile testing device that will enable a user to quickly determine whether a tick is carrying the Lyme bacteria.
Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic
Currently, it can take up to a week to get a tick tested. Dr. Lloyd compares this situation to the early days of the pandemic when the only way to get screened for the coronavirus was to travel to a clinic and then wait a few days for the test results.
Then came the “rapid tests” people could use themselves to get results in minutes. Just as those test kits helped slow the spread of COVID-19, a mobile device to test ticks could slow the spread of Lyme disease, which is on the increase across Canada.
The device Dr. Lloyd and her team are designing will fit in the palm of your hand. It will mash a tick, plunge it into a liquid to cause a chemical reaction and extract DNA, and then analyze the DNA. Results will be available in about two hours.
Science serving the community
The journey from designing a medical device to manufacturing it is long, and Dr. Lloyd and her team are just beginning. It will likely take three years just to validate the device concept in the lab, and then the next step will be a lengthy licensing process.
The Lloyd Tick Lab has, however, the advantage of an existing collaboration with an industry partner, Geneticks.
Explains Dr. Lloyd, “Whenever we find a new pathogen, we develop a test for it, and they can test for it pretty much immediately.”
This kind of rapid “translation” from research into practice is rare, according to Dr. Lloyd. So too is the close connection The Mount Allison lab has with the community of people who have been bitten by ticks or contracted Lyme disease.
Dr. Lloyd sees her relationship with that community as critical to her work. “ Community tells us what we need to worry about,” she says. “We do the worrying and then it’s the industry partner who actually does something useful about it.”
In her view, scientists need to be “at service to the community.”
“What drives me really is doing things that are useful for the community,” she says. “Science isn’t real unless you’re helping people.”
