Lyme Disease Practice and Research

Lyme Disease Research Infrastructure

LDPR provides the research infrastructure for facilitating the research of a community based non-academic practice for a broad array of research on diagnostic testing, treatments, and prevention. The availability of such an infrastructure enables a greater efficiency and breadth in the capacity to pursue intervention research. Expertise will be provided in experimental methodology, database maintenance, statistical analysis, and statistical consultation.

This provides core support for patient recruitment and follow-up, diagnosis and assessment, data base management and statistical analysis, and laboratories. Consultation will be proactive and provided to LDPR-affiliated clinical staff very early in the planning research studies and projects.

Additionally, LDPR supports a midcareer clinician to allow him to devote more time to patient-oriented research and enhance his clinical research skills in order to advance the field of patient-oriented research and mentor beginning clinical investigators. LDPR has shown evidence of a strong track record in intervention research through support of individual projects and shows promise, by virtue of the commitment of institutional resources, and identification of a research focus, to develop into a mature research center. It contains a developmental program of core research to determine the specific form and direction that a fully developed research center might take in future years.

LDPR provides the investigator with the necessary support for the initial feasibility testing of innovative clinical treatment studies on Lyme disease. It is expected that this LDPRW will serve as a basis for planning future clinical research project or cooperative clinical trial group studies.

Speed study to peer review

This LDPR envisions piloting new therapeutic clinical trials that move new treatment strategies more rapidly from the primary care office into peer review journals. The research facilitated by the Surveillance Database will have major public health significance including intervention studies that are broadly inclusive with respect to the heterogeneity of patients, the severity and chronicity of chronic Lyme disease, and types of interventions in the primary care setting. These clinical studies involving human subjects will be designed to ultimately improve Lyme disease treatment, and be based on a strong rationale. The underlying hypothesis is supported by preclinical data. The clinical correlates will have future clinical application such as development of new treatment strategies or identification of patient subsets for specific treatment therapies.