At-Home Tick Test Aims to Speed Up Lyme Disease Diagnosis

A Boston pediatric physician associate, Erin Dawicki, is bringing a consumer product called LymeAlert to market this August that lets people test a tick they’ve removed to find out quickly whether it carries the Lyme-causing bacterium. The idea came out of an MIT Sloan health-care entrepreneurship course she took in 2024, prompted by a recurring problem in her own practice: worried parents finding a tick on a child but unable or unwilling to pay for an office visit to assess a bite that may not be infectious at all.

The pitch targets a real gap in current care. Lyme is most treatable in its early stage, so clinicians often start antibiotics on suspicion — Dawicki describes ‘blanket prescribing’ because the local risk is so high — which feeds the broader antibiotic-resistance problem. Knowing within a short window whether a specific tick is infected could cut unnecessary prescriptions, unnecessary visits, and the cost and time barriers that keep patients from getting checked, while still preserving the narrow prophylactic-doxycycline window the CDC recommends after a high-risk bite.

The launch lands against a worsening backdrop. Roughly 476,000 Americans are treated for Lyme each year, and the CDC reported a spring spike in tick-borne-illness ER visits. Researchers attribute the expanding range of blacklegged ticks to warmer winters without a hard freeze, growing deer and white-footed mouse populations, habitat fragmentation, and the loss of predators that once held deer numbers down. Experts quoted expect the trend to get worse before it improves, which is why cheaper, faster front-line identification tools are drawing interest.