The First At-Home Test for Infected Ticks Could Improve Lyme Disease Diagnosis

LymeAlert will hit the market in August. The latest tool against the tick-borne illness could become a medicine cabinet staple

Kristen A. Schmitt | Freelance writer

July 31, 2026 8:00 a.m.

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

Research shows that more than 31 million Americans—or nearly one in ten people—experience a tick bite every year. While some tick bites can be harmless, these parasitic arachnids that feed on both animals and people can transmit dozens of diseases in as little as 36 to 48 hours, including anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, alpha-gal syndrome and Lyme disease.

This spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a spike in tick-borne-illness-related emergency room visits, with Lyme disease being the most common diagnosis. An estimated 476,000 patients are treated each year for Lyme disease, concentrated in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest, thanks to the prevalence of its carrier: blacklegged ticks.

Erin Dawicki is no stranger to the increase in tick-borne illnesses, especially in New England where she resides. For the past few years, the pediatric physician associate in Boston has experienced a steady uptick in kids showing up in her office with “huge swollen joints and zero trauma,” she says—symptoms that signal Lyme arthritis, a condition that develops anywhere from one to a few months after an untreated tick bite.

Lyme disease is easiest to treat during its early, or acute, stage, which makes quick tick identification critical for treatment. Most experience a “bull’s-eye” rash at the site of the bite, along with other symptoms, including fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle and joint aches, swollen lymph nodes, and neck stiffness. While the most common treatment is a 10- to 14-day course of antibiotics, the CDC also recommends a single 200-milligram dose of doxycycline within a 72-hour prophylactic window, if the tick had been attached for 36 hours, in areas where Lyme disease reports are high.

Unfortunately, even treated, some people experience post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, previously known as “chronic Lyme disease.” This diagnosis comes with persistent fatigue, musculoskeletal pain or cognitive difficulties months after completing the appropriate antibiotic treatment. According to the CDC, time, and not additional antibiotics, is needed to overcome the syndrome.

Because early treatment is critical for recovery, Dawicki’s mode of course is to complete a blood test while also prescribing antibiotics before even obtaining an official Lyme disease diagnosis. It bothers her that she has to “blanket prescribe because the risk of Lyme is so high,” she says, thus contributing to the growing antibiotic resistance health crisis within the United States.

Dawicki’s “aha moment” came during a health care entrepreneurship course she took as a MIT Sloan fellow during her MBA program in 2024. Students selected one of three innovation tracks—Lyme disease, pharmaceuticals or Parkinson’s disease—to develop and pitch an original idea. From there, classmates formed collaborative teams to advance the strongest concepts.

“I joined the class late and was assigned Lyme disease,” explains Dawicki. “Initially, my plan was to just check the box on the course, but the morning the pitches were due, an idea popped into my head.”

So often her patients call her to report they have found a tick on their child. They’re worried and want to know the best course of action, but they can’t afford to come in for an office visit. As a medical professional, Dawicki understands the variables in health care accessibility, having patients concerned about the cost of care or taking time off work for an appointment, especially when the tick in question may not even be disease-carrying.

“So, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if they could just test the tick at home, and then they know immediately if it’s Lyme-infected?” Dawicki says.

Why the uptick in ticks?

Of the estimated 899 species of ticks worldwide, about 90 are found in the continental U.S.; however, only four species are responsible for most of the infections found in the U.S. today. Found across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Upper Midwest and Southeast, the blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis, is the most widespread of the tick species. It carries Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Powassan virus and Borrelia miyamotoi disease. The western blacklegged tick, Ixodes pacificus, is found along the Pacific Coast, congregating mainly in California, Oregon and Washington, and it also carries Lyme disease and anaplasmosis. The lone star tick, Amblyomma americanum, originated in the Southeast but has recently spread across the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, carrying ehrlichiosis, Heartland virus, STARI and alpha-gal syndrome. Lastly, the American dog tick, Dermacentor variabilis, in the eastern U.S. as well as parts of the West, can carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever and tularemia. While other prevalent species include the Gulf Coast tick, Rocky Mountain wood tick and brown dog tick, they account for fewer human infections than the main four.

“Thirty years ago, there were only two reports ever of the Ixodes ticks that can transmit Lyme disease, and those were both on one coyote in Kentucky,” says Brian Stevenson, a microbiologist at the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. He studies the Lyme disease bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi and how it infects hosts and transitions between ticks and mammals. “Today, there are many, many other places where the range of the tick is expanding; therefore, the incidence or potential for Lyme disease is also expanding.”

This expansion of ticks’ geographic range is due to warmer winters, lacking the historical deep freeze needed to keep ticks in check, and growing populations of white-tailed deer and white-footed mouse populations, the parasites’ preferred hosts.

“They don’t fly or move that fast,” says Erika Machtinger, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University with expertise on tick ecology and control. “Anything that changes in the local ecology or broad regional ecology has an impact on the tick.”

She points to deforestation, reforestation and urban sprawl, all of which fragment natural habitat and change how wildlife and people navigate their environments. Those factors, along with the elimination of natural predators like wolves and mountain lions that previously kept deer numbers in check, mean ticks are out of control.

“There’s a range of things that have happened, and it’s kind of created a perfect storm,” says Machtinger. “I do anticipate it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

The CDC has reported an increase in tick-borne diseases in recent decades, with the number of documented cases doubling or increasing by an even greater magnitude for anaplasmosis/ehrlichiosis, babesiosis, Lyme disease, Powassan virus disease and spotted fever rickettsioses; cases are concentrated in the Upper Midwest and Northeast, along with parts of the South, Southeast and Ohio Valley.

While cases of pathogens and disease are easier to track, according to Machtinger, that doesn’t necessarily represent the whole picture. Instead, scientists look for long-term patterns and evidence of ticks “popping up in places and in numbers from surveillance that we haven’t seen before,” she says.

“We don’t have any numbers on tick populations,” adds Machtinger. “We can get relative estimates in specific locations if surveillance is done over a period of years, but even then, it is not super accurate because tick collection can differ by time of day, day, week of the season, season and year.”

The other issue is that tick research is only getting started. Stevenson, who is currently leading two studies aimed at fighting Lyme disease by turning the bacteria’s own internal systems against itself, notes that not all ticks are even infected with the same bacteria or the same level of bacteria.

“For a tick to become infected, it needs to feed during its previous life stage,” Stevenson says. “When they hatch, they come out as larvae, and the larvae are not infected when they hatch, but if they feed on an infected mouse, say with Borrelia burgdorferi [the bacteria that causes Lyme], those larvae can acquire the infection.”

Once they molt into nymphs, those nymphs can transmit the bacteria. “But it’s also possible that a larva fed on a mouse that wasn’t infected with Borrelia burgdorferi, which means the nymph doesn’t transmit the bacteria because it was never exposed to it,” he continues. “That’s why not every tick is going to be infectious. It really depends upon what they’re feeding on and if that host was infected.”

One way to stay tick-safe is to learn how to recognize the different kinds of ticks, in order to understand what they may be carrying.

“If the tick is not attached, which means it’s not feeding on you, therefore it’s not transmitting anything, whether or not that tick is infected makes absolutely no difference for your health,” says Stevenson. “If you have an embedded tick where there’s a chance of infection, then go to your doctor and get a dose of antibiotics as a prophylactic, just to be on the safe side.”

Tick research has also lagged behind the research of other vectors tied to human pathogen transmission, like mosquitoes, according to Machtinger. Most research into tick ecology and disease only began back in the 1980s, when Lyme disease was first discovered by medical entomologist Wilhelm Burgdorfer. Mosquito vector research, for comparison, began in 1897. Burgdorfer made the connection that the disease wasn’t viral but rather vector-based when he identified spirochetes as the disease’s causative agent in 1981, seven years after Lyme disease was first discovered in Connecticut.

“There’s been a renewed interest in earlier and better diagnostics for people,” notes Machtinger. “Vaccines, preventative medicines … instead of trying to target a pathogen, targeting the tick itself, but there’s still a recognized need for more.”

Tick control is difficult in that there aren’t tick control districts where crews spray widely to eliminate them as they can with mosquitoes. That’s because of the way tick ecology works: Their location is tied to where their hosts are. They don’t jump, fly or travel far on their own, and they live where the animals they feed on live. It’s not like targeting a mosquito-filled pond or lake. Machtinger argues that additional funding sources are needed from private industry, foundations or the government to address key issues like landscape control, through brush removal and regular mowing, for tick prevention.

“Ticks are very complicated ecologically, so we haven’t seen the same broad-scale management like we’ve seen with mosquitos. Most tick management is left to the individual,” says Machtinger, noting companies have developed products typically sold directly to consumers or pest management companies. “Broadly, it’s left up to people to decide how to protect themselves, their pets and their properties.”

Lyme disease detection in your medicine cabinet

This August, the first at-home screening tool to determine whether the tick that bit you carries Lyme disease will hit the market thanks to Dawicki and her co-founders Michelle Ewy and Brenda Ong. LymeAlert, which will sell for about $50, is designed to detect the presence of Borrelia burgdorferi, the pathogen known to cause Lyme disease, in a tick.

“LymeAlert can take heat-killed Borrelia and detect it down to really, really small quantities of the bacteria that’s present,” explains Dawicki. “Once we figured out how to do this, it almost felt like a moral obligation. We have the ability to get this out into the world, and it can become a pretty affordable way to try and prevent as many of these cases of long-term Lyme as we can.”

The test kit, which remains effective for up to 12 months, is simple to use. After carefully removing the tick with either tweezers or a tick-removal tool, you place it into the kit’s “Tick Crusher.” The grinder pulverizes the tick’s chitinous exterior, exposing the internal contents where the Borrelia burgdorferi is located. A patent-pending buffer solution readies the sample for testing. The user then inserts a test strip into a slot in the grinder. The strip’s chemically treated nitrocellulose paper functions as an immunochromatographic assay that can detect the presence of Borrelia burgdorferi.

“It’s similar to a pregnancy test or a Covid test, and takes about 15 minutes,” says Dawicki. Two lines indicates a positive result; one line is negative.

Along with the test kit, Dawicki and team are also rolling out an app that will make the test results easily accessible to everyone—even those who may be neurodivergent or have vision difficulties that could make reading the test results challenging.

“You take a picture of the test strip, and the app will read and interpret the test strip for you,” says Dawicki. “We also give people the option of choosing from a list of telehealth providers, so they can connect directly to a health care provider if they don’t have access to their own.”

Pre-existing tests have their limitations. Mail-in tests, for example, allow users to identify the species of a tick and test that specific tick for pathogens that may cause disease, but results could be delayed, depending on postage speed. “Even the common blood test we use, if you do it within 30 days of the tick bite, still misses 64 percent to 78 percent of early-stage cases because the patient hasn’t developed enough antibodies to trigger a positive test,” says Dawicki.

LymeAlert allows for a quick at-home result.

“Particularly in the New England area, people understand why you would want to test the tick, because mailing ticks to labs has become more popular,” says Dawicki. “The problem we’re trying to solve with that is when you mail a tick to a lab, the results come back after that 72-hour prophylactic window for treatment as the CDC recommends, so we’re trying to bridge that gap.”

Her team is currently completing field pilots with veterinarians in Massachusetts, based upon the higher urgency around testing tick bites for dog and horse owners. The information collected during these pilots will be used for their hot-spot maps, which will be available through the LymeAlert app.

“Any data contributed by academic institutions or through taxpayer-funded initiatives will be provided back to the public through the hot-spot maps for free, so that you can look at the map on our app and have a quick, high-level view of if you’re in a [tick] hot-spot area,” says Dawicki.

The goal is to release LymeAlert to the public this August, with several thousand preorders of the product already on deck to help with manufacturing costs. They are also working with three REI locations in the Boston metro area and New Hampshire and several independent pet retailers to hold retail pilots.

Is this the answer to tick-borne-illness prevention?

The CDC doesn’t recommend testing ticks removed from people or animals, warning that false negatives and false positives can occur. “If you get a tick that has tested negative, you’re going to feel safe, and if you get a tick that has tested positive, you’re going to feel like you’re infected,” says Machtinger. Instead, its standard recommendation is to rely on physicians to assist with the diagnosis of anything that may be tick-borne.

“I think that [LymeAlert] is a tool that needs to be used in context with user understanding of the benefits and the limitations of that product,” adds Machtinger.

Stevenson believes the at-home test concept is good in theory. “The test is, if you find a tick, does it have evidence of Borrelia burgdorferi in it?” he says. But, in practice, he adds, “They’re not actually determining: Does a person have Lyme disease?” Only about 1 to 5 percent of tick bites actually result in Lyme disease.

Regardless, using an at-home test like LymeAlert could provide peace of mind to those who live in tick-infested areas. Further, knowing the test is available could also act as a trigger for better environmental awareness.

“It could potentially aid in surveillance if we’re doing these home tests like this,” says Machtinger. “And it does offer information to share with a health care provider if you bring in the test and say it tested positive.”

Kristen A. Schmitt | | Read More

Kristen A. Schmitt writes regularly about the outdoors, conservation, wildlife, sustainable agriculture, adventure and more. Her work has been published in National Geographic, Smithsonian, Glamour, Marie Claire, Washington Post, and Outside Magazine, among others. She is currently at work on her debut novel.