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Resurrecting the 'yuppie vaccine'

Nature Medicine volume 20, pages 698–701 (2014)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 08 October 2014

This article has been updated

The only vaccine ever approved to protect against Lyme disease was pulled off the market in 2002, and drugmakers have yet to offer an alternative. What's taking so long? Cassandra Willyard investigates.

These bloodsuckers are more than just an annoyance. The ticks can carry Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. The first symptoms are typically mild—a rash that looks like a bull's-eye, followed by fever, headaches and fatigue. But, if left untreated, the disease can cause temporary facial paralysis, shooting pains, bouts of arthritis and even speech and memory problems. Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne illness in the Western world, with approximately 30,000 cases reported annually in the US. But the number of people infected could be far higher. Last summer, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a preliminary estimate based on insurance claims, lab results and population surveys that indicates roughly 300,000 people are diagnosed with the disease each year. (The gap may be because many Lyme diagnoses go unreported.) In Europe, estimates range between 65,000 and 85,000 cases per year.

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Change history

  • 22 September 2014

     In the July 2014 issue, the piece “Resurrecting the 'yuppie vaccine'” (Nat. Med. 20, 698, 2014) stated that “LYMErix originated in the late 1980s in a laboratory at the Yale School of Medicine at Yale University” and that “[b]y 1992, SmithKline Beecham had licensed the vaccine.” However, it failed to mention the work of a team of German researchers, including Markus Simon and Ulrich Schaible at the Max Planck Institute and Michael Kramer and Reinhard Wallich of the University of Heidelberg, who published initial key findings laying the groundwork for the LYMErix vaccine against Lyme disease. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of this article.

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  1. Cassandra Willyard is a freelance writer in Madison, Wisconsin.,

    Cassandra Willyard

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Willyard, C. Resurrecting the 'yuppie vaccine'. Nat Med 20, 698–701 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0714-698

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