Lyme Treatment Foundation, Inc.

Funded Research

Dr. Karl Morten, PhD, University of Oxford

Dr. Karl Morten, PhD is the Director of Graduate Studies and Principal Investigator at the Nuffield Department of Women's and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford. He is the lead researcher on the first research project Lyme Treatment Foundation is funding titled, "Using shotgun meta-genomic sequencing and new culture approaches to identify pathogens and establish the impact of long-term antibiotics on chronic Lyme patients". Learn more about this exciting research project below, or visit his website here:

Karl Morten — Nuffield Department of Women's & Reproductive Health (ox.ac.uk)MortenGroupOxford (@OxMEDiscovery) / Twitter

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“We are really excited, that together with the Lyme Treatment Foundation we have found a way to move this project forward. The project will now be solely Oxford based, and we will look at blood samples from Chronic Lyme patients who have been on a long-term course of antibiotics with Professor Jack Lambert at University College Dublin. Seventy percent of patients show improvement on this treatment.

We will investigate blood samples before treatment, after 2 months antibiotics and at 6 months follow up. Our primary objective is to identify pathogens in the blood samples and see if we can link a reduction in pathogens to improvement in symptoms.

We have just taken on a research assistant Ms Francesca Byrne who will work on this project 1.5 days per week. The project focuses primarily on running a large number of samples through a new high sensitivity pathogen sequencing approach to work up the methodology.

In addition, Fran will set up L-Form cultures from standard laboratory strains testing a panel of antibiotics to see which are effective on this persistent form of bacteria. We will also attempt to set up a protocol for growing L-Form cultures from the blood of Chronic Lyme patients.

This study, which if successful will make us competitive for grant funding in the future for larger clinical projects.”

-Dr. Karl Morten, The University of Oxford

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