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The great COVID-tech tick exploit

SL Staff B

• 3 min read

Hackers and gamers don't need to read the rest of this article because the headline says it all.

Everybody else, keep reading.

An "exploit" is a weakness, flaw, or hidden characteristic in a system that can be applied in unexpected — and often transformative — ways. It's a trick that gives you an advantage. (A superficial definition, but hey, this is a short article.)

So, with particular delight, we want to point out that a technology used to combat one existential crisis — COVID — is being used to counter a problem created by another existential crisis: the biological effects of climate change.

In other words: COVID technology is being used as a tick exploit.

During COVID, researchers learned a lot about mRNA. The proliferation of papers on mRNA-related topics has been absolutely stupendous. Before COVID, a small handful of mRNA papers were published each year. But since 2020 ... over 5,000.1

OK, with that as context, we need to add some bug backstory. As the world warms (if you think climate change is a hoax, just stop reading now), species naturally respond: some geographic ranges are no longer hospitable, while others present opportunities.

As the weather changes, tick geographic ranges expand,2 giving room for tick numbers to rise. Ticks are more active across the longer, warmer seasons.3 And, sadly, they have more opportunities to carry and transmit diseases.4, 5

The idea of a vaccine for Lyme disease — perhaps at once the most-famous and most-feared of the tick-borne illnesses — isn't new at all. Pet owners have been able to get canine and feline Lyme vaccinations since the 1990s.6

A version of these vaccines for humans has been a long time coming: side effects, effectiveness, low demand, and a bit of public wariness have all inhibited progress. Four or five different vaccines are in development. One or more will eventually catch on.

Let us introduce you to Richard Ostfeld.7 He's a disease ecologist who studies ticks and Lyme disease. He has been bitten by ticks so many times that his immune system has finally figured out what to do: it has acquired a tick response.

Now, when a tick bites Dr. Ostfeld, the tick dies.

Researchers have isolated the tick-killing mechanism in his blood, and are now using mRNA techniques (specifically, a vaccine "platform" developed during COVID) to attempt to create an anti-tick vaccine. This is NOT a Lyme disease vaccine, or a Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever vaccine, or a vaccine for any other tick-borne disease.

It is a TICK vaccine. So far, in current testing, it often kills the tick before it can transmit any disease at all.8

Yep, of course: further work required.

But if we can make the mRNA-induced "acquired tick response" technique work ... wow! A world-class exploit.

And now, in related news: in the game Don't Starve Alone, you can keep deadly Merms out of your base by exploiting the undocumented attraction Merms have for Chester11 the mobile storage unit: just take his Eye Bone stick far from your camp, and leave it there. The Merm will follow. (If you are a gamer and made it to this paragraph, we love you.)

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  1. Zhang, Chaobin, Yuhang Wang, Jianding Peng, Xiaotian Wen, Youwen Zhang, Kejun Li, Hanjian Du, and Xiaofei Hu. “Decoding Trends in mRNA Vaccine Research: A Comprehensive Bibliometric Study.” Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics 20, no. 1: 2355037. Accessed March 27, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2024.2355037.
  2. Bouchard, C, A Dibernardo, J Koffi, H Wood, PA Leighton, and LR Lindsay. “N Increased Risk of Tick-Borne Diseases with Climate and Environmental Changes.” Canada Communicable Disease Report 45, no. 4 (April 4, 2019): 83–89. https://doi.org/10.14745/ccdr.v45i04a02.
  3. Canada, Public Health Agency of. “Lyme Disease: Monitoring.” Education and awareness, January 27, 2015. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/lyme-disease/surveillance-lyme-disease.html.
  4. Voyiatzaki, Chrysa, Sevastiani I. Papailia, Maria S. Venetikou, John Pouris, Maria E. Tsoumani, and Effie G. Papageorgiou. “Climate Changes Exacerbate the Spread of Ixodes Ricinus and the Occurrence of Lyme Borreliosis and Tick-Borne Encephalitis in Europe—How Climate Models Are Used as a Risk Assessment Approach for Tick-Borne Diseases.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 11 (May 27, 2022): 6516. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19116516.
  5. Mysterud, Atle, Solveig Jore, Olav Østerås, and Hildegunn Viljugrein. “Emergence of Tick-Borne Diseases at Northern Latitudes in Europe: A Comparative Approach.” Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (November 24, 2017): 16316. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15742-6.
  6. Merck Animal Health USA. “NOBIVAC History of Prevention.” Accessed March 27, 2025. https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/nobivac/nobivac-history-of-prevention.
  7. “I’m a Tick Biologist Whose Body Seems to Kill off Ticks,” July 31, 2023. https://www.caryinstitute.org/news-insights/feature/im-tick-biologist-whose-body-seems-kill-ticks.
  8. Hart, Thomas M., Yingjun Cui, Sam R. Telford, Alejandro Marín-López, Keith Calloway, Yile Dai, Jaqueline Matias, et al. “Tick Feeding or Vaccination with Tick Antigens Elicits Immunity to the Ixodes Scapularis Exoproteome in Guinea Pigs and Humans.” Science Translational Medicine 17, no. 791 (March 26, 2025): eads9207. https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.ads9207.
  9. Verbeke, Rein, Michael J. Hogan, Karin Loré, and Norbert Pardi. “Innate Immune Mechanisms of mRNA Vaccines.” Immunity 55, no. 11 (November 8, 2022): 1993–2005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2022.10.014.
  10. Don’t Starve Wiki. “Chester/DST.” Accessed March 27, 2025. https://dontstarve.wiki.gg/wiki/Chester/DST.

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