Lyme Disease Biobank (LDB)
Providing whole blood, serum, and urine samples with well-annotated clinical data to researchers in the areas of diagnosis, treatment and prevention of Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections.
Why this initiative?
Lyme Disease is a poorly defined illness and presents great challenges for clinicians. Doctors need better ways to discriminate between the various stages of the disease, and better ways to diagnose tick-borne diseases and improve treatments to help patients heal. Without well characterized samples from Lyme disease patients in all stages of the illness, researchers are limited in what they can learn. The goal is to provide them with the tools so that new diagnostics, new biomarkers, and new directions in pathogenesis of Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections can be identified.
To this end, Gordon Medical is partnered with the Bay Area Lyme Foundation’s (BALF) Lyme Disease Biobank to collect blood and urine samples from patients with chronic Lyme disease. These samples will be used by researchers to better understand the disease and to evaluate solutions.
What we’re doing
The Lyme Disease Biobank operates an online screening process for chronic Lyme disease patients for enrollment in the Biobank at Gordon Medical Associates in northern California. When patients are qualified for the Biobank, they are contacted with information about the enrollment process. Patients go through enrollment in othe Gordon Medical offices, giving a medical history to be used in conjunction with their samples, and donate urine and blood. There are also locations that collect samples from acute Lyme patients.
About the initiative
The Bay Area Lyme Foundation created the Lyme Disease Biobank in 2014 to fill a national need to make whole blood, serum, and urine samples with well-annotated clinical data available to investigators. Initially only patients with new cases of Lyme disease were accepted. Gordon Medical partnered with the Biobank in early 2019, providing our extensive knowledge of Lyme disease, and making participation in the Biobank available to the tremendous numbers of chronic Lyme disease patients in our practice and in the wider San Francisco Bay area. GMA also accepts people into the program from outside of the area when they are able to come to our office to enroll and give samples. In addition, we provide the screening and support for a separate collection site in southern CA at Osteopathic Medical Associates – San Diego.
Since the beginning of its partnership with LDB, Gordon Medical has screened over 440 patients for participation, with over 200 qualified, and has so far enrolled and collected samples from over 60.
Where we are now
Since the beginning of its partnership with LDB, Gordon Medical has screened over 440 patients for participation, with over 200 qualified, and has so far enrolled and collected samples from over 60. Each sample donated makes it possible for over 40 different research projects to have well characterized blood and urine samples from Lyme patients. Although enrollment is paused during the Covid-19 pandemic, we are continuing to collect names for when we are once again able to take samples.
As of December, 2019, more than 45 research projects have used blood and urine samples from the BALF’s Biobank, including the first published studies using samples from the LDB, and advances in research of disulfiram for treating individuals suffering from chronic Lyme disease and chronic babesiosis, an approach that BALF was the first to support.