{"id":101584,"date":"2026-10-21T04:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T08:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/?p=101584"},"modified":"2026-10-21T09:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T13:28:09","slug":"after-25-years-studying-lyme-disease-utoledo-researcher-gets-his-biggest-shot-at-a-developing-a-vaccine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/10_21_2026\/after-25-years-studying-lyme-disease-utoledo-researcher-gets-his-biggest-shot-at-a-developing-a-vaccine","title":{"rendered":"After 25 Years Studying Lyme Disease, UToledo Researcher Gets His Biggest Shot at Developing a Vaccine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Mark Wooten grew up raising cattle in rural Arkansas, wandered into bacteriology in college, and made a bet early in his career that Lyme disease was going to become a major public health problem.<\/p>\n

Twenty-five years later, working out of The University of Toledo, he\u2019s still collecting on that bet.<\/p>\n

\"Portrait

Dr. Mark Wooten, a professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, has received a five-year, $3.7 million award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to help him continue developing an unconventional Lyme disease vaccine.<\/p><\/div>\n

Wooten, a professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Medicine and Life Sciences, has received a five-year, $3.7 million award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The grant will help him continue developing an unconventional Lyme disease vaccine built around something he noticed while watching bacteria move inside living tissue under a microscope.<\/p>\n

There is currently no Lyme disease vaccine available in the United States. The last one, LYMErix, was pulled from the market in 2002. Meanwhile, the CDC estimates approximately 476,000 people may be diagnosed with Lyme disease each year in the United States, and the tick populations that carry it have been steadily expanding their range, including into Ohio.<\/p>\n

Lyme disease is caused by Borrelia burgdorferi<\/em>, a bacterium that spends its entire life inside either the tick that carries it or the animal or human it infects.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s what\u2019s called a spirochete. It looks and moves like a snake,\u201d Wooten said. \u201cIt can\u2019t live outside of a host; it has to be inside either the tick that transmits it or some reservoir species like mice.\u201d<\/p>\n

What makes the disease so damaging is what happens after infection takes hold. The bacteria spread through the body, triggering inflammation wherever they reach a critical threshold: Lyme arthritis in a joint, Lyme carditis in the heart, and neurological symptoms and brain fog when they reach the brain.<\/p>\n

\u201cAntibiotics can clear it, but there\u2019s damage already done to your heart or your brain that can cause chronic disease,\u201d Wooten said. \u201cThat\u2019s why there\u2019s a push for vaccines to keep it from ever being established.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wooten\u2019s vaccine takes an unusual approach. While using advanced microscopy to study how the bacteria navigate through tissue, his team engineered a strain that could only move forward. Unable to reverse when they hit a dead end, the bacteria became trapped, stopped moving and were eventually cleared by the immune system.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe engineered this one and it can\u2019t go in reverse, it can only go forward,\u201d Wooten said. \u201cAnd so, because of that, they could last about three days, but eventually they\u2019re blocked. Once they stop moving, they can be seen by the immune system.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Wooten calls a \u201ccrippled\u201d version of the bacteria triggers a full immune response before being cleared from the body. It\u2019s the same principle behind attenuated vaccines like those for measles and chickenpox, in which a weakened form of a pathogen trains the immune system without causing disease. In previous studies funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the strain produced an immune response as rich and complex as a natural infection, protected mice for up to a year after immunization and was cleared safely even in animals with severely compromised immune systems.<\/p>\n

UToledo filed a provisional patent application for the approach in December 2025, with research assistant John Presloid named as co-inventor. A decision on converting it to a full utility or international patent application is expected by the end of the year, a step that would position the technology for potential licensing or commercial partnerships.<\/p>\n

The new grant will allow Wooten\u2019s team to refine the attenuated vaccine by testing different doses, timing schedules and immune-boosting additives called adjuvants. They\u2019ll also work to identify which proteins on the bacteria\u2019s surface are most responsible for triggering protective immunity, with the goal of building a cleaner recombinant vaccine containing just those key proteins.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people don\u2019t want attenuated bacteria in their body,\u201d Wooten said. \u201cBut if I can identify a handful of candidates that promote protective immunity, I can make a cocktail with two or three recombinant proteins. It\u2019ll be cleaner.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the end of the grant, Wooten hopes to have at least one candidate ready to attract pharmaceutical interest and move toward clinical development.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope is at the end of five years, we\u2019ll have either an attenuated vaccine that would be close enough to good that pharma would be interested, or a mix of individual recombinant proteins that pharma would probably be more interested in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The grant will also expand Wooten\u2019s lab, funding research associates, postdoctoral researchers and students and continuing his 25-year track record of training infectious disease scientists at UToledo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"Portrait<\/a>

A $3.7 million NIH grant will fund the next phase of Dr. Mark Wooten’s work on an unconventional vaccine approach that turns the bacterium’s own biology against it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":932,"featured_media":101587,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,95,38,1,3,7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/932"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101584"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101603,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101584\/revisions\/101603"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}