From Childhood Fear to Scientific Frontier: A Postdoc’s Journey Through Lyme Disease Research

By Mase Peterson

For Postdoctoral Scholar Jeffrey Bourgeois, Lyme disease has always been more than just a research focus—it’s personal. Raised in rural Glocester, Rhode Island, where tick checks and Lyme prevention were a part of daily life, Dr. Bourgeois’s fascination with Borrelia burgdorferi began long before he entered a lab. Now preparing to launch his own lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Dr. Bourgeois is using natural diversity in rodents and bacteria to better understand—and ultimately disrupt—the ecology of Lyme disease.

Tufts is home to one of the world’s most comprehensive groups of tick-borne disease researchers. Led by co-directors Linden Hu, Paul and Elaine Chervinsky Professor of Immunology, and Robert P. Smith, a physician at Maine Medical Center and professor of medicine, the team recently secured a $20.7 million federal grant, further solidifying Tufts’ position as a global leader in Lyme disease research.

In this Q&A, part of a feature series spotlighting members of the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative, Dr. Bourgeois discusses his research on the interactions between rodents, ticks, and Borrelia burgdorferi. He focuses on understanding how these animals spread the bacteria and explores strategies to break the infection cycle and ultimately eradicate Lyme disease.

Tell us about yourself! How did you get involved with the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative?

I’m a postdoc in the Linden Hu lab. I came to Tufts after finishing up my PhD down south in Dr. Dennis Ko’s lab at Duke University. I chose Dr. Hu’s lab because of a passion for understanding cool host-microbe interactions and because Lyme disease has long been of interest to me. I grew up in rural (Glocester) Rhode Island—which means my entire life I’ve been taught to be afraid of ticks and Lyme disease. This involved a combination of annual viewings of corny videos in health class about ticks, as well as hearing about classmates who had to sit out of sports or miss school because of a nasty bout of Lyme, talking to my neighbor about her experience with antibiotic-refractory arthritis, and comforting a friend whose mom had a particularly unpleasant battle with the microbe. Beyond Borrelia burgdorferi being my childhood monster that went bump in the night, in graduate school I also learned that it’s so, so cool. It’s an absolutely beautiful type of bacteria called a spirochete, and its genome defies logic. It’s a privilege to study it.

Can you describe your role in the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative and the unique perspective you bring?

My role in the Lyme Initiative is slightly changing as I transition out of my postdoc and prepare to launch my independent laboratory at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Throughout my postdoc I have been studying natural diversity in how different hosts interact with Borrelia burgdorferi. This has primarily involved studying how a North American rodent—Peromyscus leucopus interacts with Borrelia burgdorferi. We’re interested in this rodent because it’s likely responsible for spreading Borrelia burgdorferi into ticks.

Unlike many other bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi is really bad at transmitting from mother to children—both in ticks and in mammals—meaning that it is only able to survive in nature as a result of ticks infecting rodents, and those rodents in turn infecting ticks. Our thinking is that if we understand how these rodents and ticks infect each other with B. burgdorferi, and if we can stop them from getting infected, we can break this cycle and eradicate Lyme disease. I’ll be taking this and a few other projects with me to Worcester as I try to broadly understand how host and bacterial natural diversity contribute to a range of different Borrelia burgdorferi infection outcomes. Overall, these projects are informed by my time in graduate school where Dr. Ko instilled in me a deep appreciation for using natural genetic diversity as a springboard to ask cool and important questions.

What aspect of the research excites you the most?

There’s so much unknown! The vast majority of what we know about how mammals and bacteria interact comes from studies with lab mice—which are so, so different from my Peromyscus leucopus. They’re about 25 million years diverged on the tree of life. We’re constantly finding new ways in which Peromyscus leucopus break traditional dogma.

What about TUSM has prepared you to be involved in this process?

Tufts University School of Medicine, and the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative in particular, has an amazing track record of helping people launch their careers. The Lyme Initiative is a remarkably supportive environment dripping with creativity and enthusiasm for cool science—which makes sense with people like Drs. Linden Hu, Sam Telford, and John Leong at the helm. I’m really proud to join the ranks of some of our other alums who have gone on to start their own labs (Yi-Pin Lin, Tanja Petnicki-Ocwieja, and Peter Gwynne). Notably, none of us seem to be keen to go very far—Petnicki-Ocwieja and Gwynne launched their independent labs at TUSM and Prof. Lin recently moved back to the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. I think we all realize how valuable it is to stay connected to the amazing Lyme community that Tufts has cultivated. I'll certainly still be collaborating with the Tufts Initiative from over in Worcester.”

What do you hope this research will achieve for patients with chronic Lyme disease and the medical community?

My thought has always been that the “easiest” way to prevent chronic Lyme disease is to avoid ever being infected with Borrelia burgdorferi. While I have some projects aimed at trying to help patients who develop Lyme disease avoid or treat lingering symptoms, my primary focus is on trying to understand the disease ecology in ways that could lead to eradication.

What challenges do you foresee, and how are you addressing them?

Every so often when I’m talking about my long-term research goals of eradicating Borrelia burgdorferi from nature, someone reminds me of all the times well-meaning people have tried and failed to solve ecological problems by releasing wolves into an environment. Trying to eradicate something is hard, and we’ve already learned some lessons in how tricky eradicating Borrelia might be. There are lots of papers out there demonstrating that interventions that we think should reduce Lyme disease burden often don’t work—albeit there are some promising studies as well.

Are there any untapped opportunities in Lyme disease research or perhaps within another public health initiative you’re eager to explore in your career?

A big part of my PhD looked at roles for natural human genetic diversity in infectious disease outcomes and I think some really cool new stuff is coming out in that space for Lyme. In particularly, I’ve been excited at the studies in Lyme Initiative member Klemen Strle’s lab, as well as our Boston neighbor Dr. Michal Caspi Tal’s group at MIT. I’m hoping to move back into the human genetics space soon!