School of Medicine

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Study finds potential new treatment path for lasting Lyme disease symptoms

Tulane University researchers have identified a promising new approach to treating persistent neurological symptoms associated with Lyme disease, offering hope to patients who suffer from long-term effects of the bacterial infection, even after antibiotic treatment. Their results were published in Frontiers in Immunology. Principal investigator Geetha Parthasarathy, PhD, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at the Tulane National Primate Research Center, has discovered that fibroblast growth factor receptor inhibitors, a type of drug previously studied in the context of cancer, can significantly reduce inflammation and cell death in brain and nerve tissue samples infected with Borrelia burgdorferi.  Read more here.