A University of Toledo researcher who has studied Lyme disease for 25 years has received a five-year, $3.7 million award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to continue developing an unconventional vaccine for the tick-borne illness, the university announced.
Dr. Mark Wooten, a professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology in UToledo’s College of Medicine and Life Sciences, leads the work. The award is part of the National Institutes of Health and will support his team as it refines a vaccine approach built on how the Lyme bacterium moves through living tissue.
There is currently no Lyme disease vaccine available in the United States; the last one was pulled from the market in 2002, the university said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about 476,000 people may be diagnosed with Lyme disease each year in the United States, and the tick populations that carry it have been expanding their range, including into Ohio.
Lyme disease is caused by Borrelia burgdorferi, a spiral-shaped bacterium that must live inside either the tick that carries it or the animal or person it infects. After infection, the bacteria can spread through the body and trigger inflammation in joints, the heart and the nervous system, which is why Wooten and other researchers argue prevention matters even though antibiotics can clear an infection.
Wooten’s approach uses an engineered strain of the bacterium that can move only forward and cannot reverse. In the university’s description of the work, bacteria that cannot back up become trapped, stop moving and are cleared by the immune system, while the weakened strain still triggers a full immune response — the same general principle behind attenuated vaccines for measles and chickenpox. In earlier studies funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the strain protected mice for up to a year and was cleared safely even in animals with severely compromised immune systems, the university said.
The new grant will fund work on doses, timing schedules and immune-boosting additives called adjuvants, and a parallel effort to identify the surface proteins most responsible for protective immunity. Wooten said that work could lead to a cleaner recombinant vaccine built from just two or three proteins, alongside the attenuated candidate.
UToledo filed a provisional patent application for the approach in December 2025, with research assistant John Presloid named as co-inventor, and a decision on converting it to a full application is expected by the end of the year. Wooten said his hope is that by the end of the five years, at least one candidate will be ready to attract pharmaceutical interest and move toward clinical development, while the grant also funds research associates, postdoctoral researchers and students in his lab.
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