Lyme patients: Your blood could hold the key to chronic LymeArticle:
https://www.lymedisease.org/wyss-institute-chronic-lyme-study/Sign up to participate (Clinic sites are in Boston, MA and Philadelphia, PA):
https://sanguinebio.com/patients/apheresis-cld/Quote:
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The Wyss Institute at Harvard University seeks Lyme patients to donate blood cells to support cutting-edge research.The process is painless and you’ll get paid for your time.
Swollen lymph nodes can be an early symptom of Lyme disease. Lymph nodes, lumps of immune tissue scattered throughout the body, play an important role in the body’s immune response against invaders like bacteria and viruses. The bacterium that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, seems to “hide” in the lymph nodes, which does trigger an immune response, but one that is not strong enough to eliminate it.
Doctors think this could be a reason why some patients suffer from repeated attacks of Lyme symptoms, and why long-term antibiotics may not be effective for treating those symptoms. But how B. burgdorferi behaves in the body’s lymph nodes isn’t fully understood.
A group of researchers led by Harvard Principal Investigators Don Ingber and Girija Goyal is now recruiting chronic Lyme patients to donate their white blood cells for a cutting-edge study that will investigate the interaction of B. burgdorferi and human lymph nodes by growing lymph nodes in the lab.
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