The National Institutes of Health has several grants to fight tick-borne diseases caused by flaviviruses and bacteria such as Borrelia miyamotoi. Recently, the Laboratory of Medical Zoology’s (LMZ) TickReport service at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, L2 Diagnostics of New Haven, a biotech company that has developed a human test for B. miyamotoi and professor Joppe Hovius, at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, were awarded a two-year, $600,000 small-business innovation grant (SBIR) from NIH to support their research.

If the initial two years of Phase I are successful, the researchers say, they hope to receive funding to recruit larger numbers of patients to further validate the new assay and to include new research sites in the Midwest, Europe and Asia, the main regions where B. miyamotoi has been described.

More information on the NIH SBIR program can be found here: https://sbir.nih.gov

For those interested in technologies related to tick-borne diseases, should follow this link: https://www.ott.nih.gov/opportunities?body_value=tick