MSU Lyme Disease Research Squeaks Through NIH Funding Freeze

While the Trump administration appears to view scientific research like a tick sucking blood from the American taxpayer, a real tick scientist has landed federal support for a possible Lyme disease breakthrough.

Patrick Secor’s biology lab at Montana State University announced a $2.8-million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health at the end of February. That was the same time the Washington Post ran the story “NIH reels with fear, uncertainty about future of scientific research.” The same day MSU posted the Secor announcement, The Atlantic magazine published “Inside the Collapse at the NIH.”  

“I’m forever grateful for that funding,” Secor told Mountain Journal. “They’ve been supporting me since 2017. We could not do this research at all, couldn’t really begin, without it.”

According to reporting by The Atlantic, NIH acting director Matthew Memoli froze virtually all of an estimated $48 billion in NIH grants after Trump ordered the government-wide funding freeze on January 21. On February 7, after agency-wide disruption, Memoli allowed a few grants to be released. But he imposed other restrictions, such as preventing grant recommendations from being posted to the Federal Register.

Secor’s grant didn’t evade the freeze. Instead, it was approved several months ago while he was in the process of transferring his project from the University of Montana in Missoula over to the MSU campus in Bozeman.

“I’ve been working on this with [UM biologist and professor] Scott Samuels, who got me into Lyme disease research,” Secor said. “This grant was submitted through an NIH Notice of Special Interest for work on vector-borne diseases such as Lyme disease, which is a huge problem in the U.S. It’s expanding every single year.”

Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne illness in the entire Northern Hemisphere, Secor said, with more than 90,000 U.S. cases reported in 2023 alone.

“That’s likely a huge underestimate, because most cases are not reported or [are] misdiagnosed,” he said. “After I’ve done talks, I’ve got many emails from the public expressing frustration about how their diagnosis was taking so many years. The symptoms are chronic inflammation, migraines, heart problems — they’re kind of all over the place.”

The disease takes its name from the town of Lyme, Connecticut, where it was first identified in 1975. The black-legged deer tick that carries it inhabits the Northeast and Midwest United States. It doesn’t typically survive in the drier climates of the Rocky Mountain West. However, changing climatic moisture patterns have expanded its range to the eastern edge of North Dakota.

The Greater Yellowstone region harbors American dog ticks and Rocky Mountain wood ticks. They transmit illnesses such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever and tularemia, but not Lyme disease.

On February 28, the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases confirmed that a black-legged tick, aka deer tick, had been found in 2023 on a hunting dog that had been flushing pheasants in Dawson County.

“The confirmation does not mean that Montanans are at increased risk of the various tickborne diseases that [black-legged ticks] spread.,” the NIH release stated. “Rather, the finding indicates the need for additional tick surveillance and public awareness to fully assess the risk.” It also noted that nearly every human case of Lyme disease diagnosed in Montana to date appeared to have originated outside the state.

Secor doesn’t study the ticks so much as a bacterium inside them, and a virus inside the bacterium. Lyme disease comes from the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria. A type of virus known as a bacteriophage infects the bacteria. It doesn’t cause the disease, but it appears capable of a trick called horizontal gene transfer. As described by Bozeman natural historian and author David Quammen, this allows the virus to rewrite parts of the bacteria’s DNA coding.

Most tick-borne bacteria don’t have bacteriophages. Secor’s work spotted one while examining the genome of B. burgdorferi. A genome is the complete set of DNA in an organism; the genetic code directing how that particular organism grows and functions.  

“Those other genomes have nothing that looks like a virus,” Secor said. “That’s not the case for Lyme disease bacteria. That’s a curiosity. There’s got to be some sort of symbiotic relationship going there.”

That matters because the host mammal’s immune system can usually identify invaders and produce antibodies to fight the infection. The bacteriophages somehow disguise the bacteria’s presence, making it able to evade the antibodies of a previously infected animal like the Romulan cloaking device in Star Trek.

“Ticks are born without the bacteria,” Secor said. “They acquire them from their first blood meal. A mouse in New England gets bitten many times, so it ends up carrying numerous strains of Lyme bacteria. As the tick feeds, multiple strains of bacteria get into the tick, and the virus shuttles genes between the bacteria.”

And that might open a new path to fight the disease.

“An antibiotic kills bacteria,” Secor explained. “A vaccine elicits an immune response to a specific molecule. It breaks up its function, without necessarily killing it. That might flag it for recognition by the host’s immune system. It decloaks the bacteria, so to speak. One of the major goals of our research is to identify new vaccine targets to prevent Lyme disease spread.”

Reaching that goal requires much more than just Secor and his microscope. Tick research in Montana dates back more than a century, when pathologists came to the Bitterroot Valley to trace the cause of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Starting in tents, woodsheds and abandoned school buildings, the scientists eventually founded the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton. The discovery of the tick vector and later vaccine was so momentous, it was dramatized in a 1937 movie called “Green Light” starring Errol Flynn.

Today, Rocky Mountain Labs is affiliated with the National Institutes of Health and sprawls across the NIH campus with 30 buildings and a Biosafety Level 4 facility capable of studying Ebola and other extremely dangerous infectious pathogens. Its staff was instrumental in the breakthroughs that produced the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine against Covid. And it’s where Secor gets his B. burgdorferi supply.

Those “Labs” and “Institutes” have always bedeviled copy editors; the plural Institutes reflects the fact it combines 27 separate centers of research. Last year, NIH sent at least 80 percent of its $48 million budget to outside researchers. That amounts to about 60,000 proposals a year, spread among 300,000 scientists at more than 2,500 institutions. Each dollar of NIH investment generated about $2.46 in economic activity, totaling an estimated $93 billion in 2023.  

Secor’s grant pays his salary as well as that of a senior scientist and lab manager at MSU, along with a similar team at UM. It also covers the costs of veterinarians who take care of the lab mice used in experiments, and the ticks raised at a NIH facility at Oklahoma State University.

“Everybody’s got a sense of uncertainty now, so I’m glad to know the funds are there,” Secor said. “We are working on it. We’ve hired people. We’re very fortunate to have the grant and work on the project.”