EU project to develop tick vaccine
EU-funded researchers are launching a new five-year project to find a vaccine against ticks to prevent them transmitting the diseases they carry to people they bite. The investigation will be funded under the Seventh Framework Programme.
The consortium, led by the Academic Medical Centre (AMC) at the University of Amsterdam, will investigate a vaccine directed against the tick and will receive €3m of EU funding. It’s hoped a single vaccine could prevent transmission of multiple human pathogens from the tick to the host with the ultimate aim to cut the incidence of diseases that affect thousands of people each year in Europe. The researchers will investigate ways to interfere with the transmission of tick-borne pathogens from ticks to their hosts as well as ways to interfere with tick feeding.
The bite of the tick Ixodes ricinus can cause Lyme disease, tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) and human babesiosis, serious diseases that are being in increasingly detected in Europe. According to a report by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control published in 2012, the number of TBE cases ranged in the past decade from 1,900 to 2,630 cases a year, with most cases occurring between July and October. Countries in Central Europe and around the Baltic Sea are particularly affected.
Speaking about the forthcoming research, Joppe Hovius of AMC said: “Our aim is to deliver a ‘proof of concept’ in animal models with a clear idea of how we will proceed from there to a human vaccine. In addition, our research will give us much more insight into the molecular mechanisms behind transmission of these pathogens.”
The project is named ANTIDotE – ANti-tick vaccines to prevent TIck-borne Diseases in Europe – and will start in December 2013.
