Plan For Genetically Engineered Mice To Fight Lyme Disease On Nantucket Still In Play

More than six years have passed since MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt first proposed his radical idea to combat Lyme disease on Nantucket: release thousands of genetically-engineered white-footed mice on the island that could break the cycle of infection.

While Esvelt and his team had been relatively quiet during the pandemic, the plan is still very much alive and moving forward. On Saturday, Esvelt returned to the island for a public meeting to update Nantucket residents on MIT’s “Mice Against Ticks” project, and solicit feedback from the community.

Esvelt, along with his colleague Joanna Buchthal, a PhD student at MIT, and tick researcher Sam Telford, presented the latest updates on their progress toward creating Lyme-resistant mice that could one day help reduce the incidence of Lyme disease on Nantucket.

In short, the project is exploring “permanently immunizing mouse populations to block transmission by making and releasing mice that produce protective mouse antibodies from birth and pass immunity on to their pups.”

Nantucket has one of the highest incidence rates for Lyme disease in the country, and there were nearly 200 confirmed cases on the island last year.

“We’re here to reconnect with the Nantucket community,” Esvelt said to a crowd of about two dozen people who gathered at The Lemon Press on Main Street for the presentation. “We’re inviting your criticisms, concerns, and guidance.”

Esvelt and Buchthal said they will soon test their genetically-engineered mice in field trials on a small, uninhabited and privately owned island (they did not reveal specifically where) to determine their efficacy. But first, Esvelt said, “if we invent a technology to change the environment,” the MIT team wants the community to understand the science better and make an informed decision.

“What if instead of a only a few mice being immune to Lyme disease, what if we identified the bits of DNA in those mice that have been exposed, encoded it and passed it on to those descendants?” Esvelt said. “ We would create mice that are Lyme-resistant and can pass that on to their descendants. Eventually one could immunize the bulk of the population.”

As the mice are the primary reservoir for tick-borne diseases, immunizing the population through genetic engineering could break the cycle of infection.

Nantucket Board of Health vice chair Malcolm MacNab is on the ad-hoc committee of island residents that is weighing the proposal. He said that if the trials are successful, the “Mice Against Ticks” project would likely have to come to a community vote of some kind form before moving forward on the island.

Among those in the audience Saturday was Allison Snow, professor emeritus at Ohio State University’s Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology. Snow had previously shared her concerns about the “Mice Against Ticks” project, and renewed them on Saturday with regard to the unknowns of such a unprecedented bioengineering project.

“It’s new territory for the regulatory system and ecologists,” Snow said. “It’s not on a lot of people’s radar that this project is happening. There needs to be a lot of input from other ecologists and to look at these questions. I’m not against it, I just have a lot of questions.”

Nantucket’s resident tick expert, Dr. Tim Lepore, was also in attendance at The Lemon Press on Saturday. While he didn’t speak, Lepore told the Current that he supports the project primarily because other efforts to reduce the incidence of tick-borne diseases have failed. People won’t take simple precautions like regular tick checks after being outdoors, he said, and initiatives to bring down the island’s deer population through an extended hunt have also been met with resistance.

Telford, who has studied tick-borne diseases on Nantucket for decades, said he too is in favor of the approach Esvelt and his team have outlined.

“Mice against ticks is an example of a long-term approach,” Telford said. “This is a model for a futuristic public health effort across the world for places that have infections maintained by rodents.”