LYME LAB: Temple Douglas, then a high school student, works with former George Mason University grad student Davide Tamburro during the Aspiring Scientist Summer Internship Program.EVAN CANTWELL/GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITYToward the end of her 2009 summer internship at a George Mason University proteomics lab, high school student Temple Douglas wondered if she could use her research to turn a family problem into a clinical breakthrough. Lyme disease, a scourge in her native Virginia, had previously struck both her mother and brother, so the family was aware of the drawbacks of the single available diagnostic test. The current blood test probes for antibodies developed against the disease-causing bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which only appear several weeks after the onset of symptoms such as the telltale reddish oval or “bull’s-eye” rash that appears in three-fourths of cases. What if the hydrogel nanoparticles Douglas had been using to concentrate cancer biomarkers could directly trap B. burgdorferi proteins from patients and enable early-stage detection?
“Those bacteria have to be shedding proteins, and those proteins are probably secreted in the urine,” Douglas remembers thinking. So she continued to work in Alessandra Luchini’s lab throughout the fall and the following summer, fine-tuning the particles and testing their affinity for Lyme-causing bacterial proteins in urine. Her hard work paid off with a published paper (Biomaterials, 32:1157-66, 2011), and clinical trials of the test, launched in 2012.
Douglas joined Luchini’s lab, her first real research experience, through George Mason’s Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program (ASSIP). “Our goal. . . was to give [high school and college students] hands-on experiments in the lab so that they could experience the agony and the ecstasy of science,” says program cofounder and George Mason researcher Lance Liotta. ...
