Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains why urine detects Lyme disease better than blood. Borrelia sheds up to 40% of its surface proteins during cell division, and the kidneys filter these fragments into urine. A concentrated urine test targeting these biomarkers could be more sensitive than blood tests.
— and so, and then the other issue is, is that as she mentioned, Lyme doesn't like to be in the blood, right? So blood isn't necessarily the best sample. And so the microbiology of these pathogens really matters because they're stealthy, they're tricky, and so what you're going after is important. And so for Lyme disease, for Borrelia, what we do is a completely different approach. So instead of looking at blood, you know, if you look at the microbiology of the pathogen, one of the things that it does is it's constantly shedding surface part of its cell wall, so either proteins or components of the structural cell wall into its environment. And, and over 40% can be shed when it— when the cell divides, right? And so that gets left into the environment in various forms. They actually get cleared— a significant amount gets cleared by the kidneys and aggregates in the bladder and excreted in urine. So the approach that we take is very different. We're actually looking— we use urine as a sample. Because this is a great matrix and there's been a wealth of information that shows this is useful for diagnostics. And we concentrate it and then use that— those, you know, biomarkers and detect them in the urine to determine whether or not the pathogen is present.
