A Rutgers scientist is trying to heal a sick horse by creating an ultra-sensitive DNA test.
Steven Schutzer, a professor of medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, created a special DNA test that helped a Cornell University School of Veterinary Medicine team identify a sick 11-year-old Swedish Warmblood with a neurological illness.
The corkscrew-shaped bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi was not detected by a standard test.
Early detection is important with the disease.
Immediate treatment is a result of early diagnosis. The best chance for a cure is given by that.
The team has developed a test that can identify the pathogen in a sample of the horse's spinal fluid and successfully treat it. The test works by isolating the genes that cause the disease.
Schutzer said that the method was similar to having a special "fishhook" that only grabs Borrelia DNA. It's a direct test if we know you have active disease if it's circulating in the blood or spinal fluid.
According to the CDC, the most common mosquito-borne illness in the US is lyme disease. A skin rash may or may not happen in humans. The infections can move to other parts of the body.
Horses are dead end hosts for B. burgdorferi, meaning they don't spread the disease. Some horses don't show signs of the disease. Chronic weight loss can be a symptom if it occurs. When there is a suspicion of aLyme disease, the tests are administered.
There were two tests that didn't show an infection in the case described. Schutzer's test was the only one to detect the disease.
Damage to the nervous system, joints, skin and even vision can be caused by the disease.
Thomas Divers, a professor of medicine and co-chief of the Section of Large, said that veterinarians have been frustrated by the lack of confirmation of the disease in horses. The technique is very promising. The horse's complete athletic recovery was the result of focused treatment against B. burgdorferi.
While many illnesses, such as COVID-19 and strep throat, attack humans with many numbers of pathogens, in other diseases, such asLyme disease, thebacteria slowly reproduce within a host, making detection more difficult.
Schutzer is an expert in tick-borne diseases and has been working to develop ways to better detect diseases that have low copy numbers of a pathogen.
According to the CDC, there are almost half a million cases of the disease in humans each year. The black-legged tick, also known as the deer tick, is responsible for most cases of Lyme disease in the US and seems to be increasing in abundance.
The Institute of Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine was one of the scientists involved.
More information: Thomas J. Divers et al, Genomic hybrid capture assay to detect Borrelia burgdorferi: an application to diagnose neuroborreliosis in horses, Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation (2022). DOI: 10.1177/10406387221112617
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