Once bitten: shaping the product profile for the Lyme-Aid Diagnostic Test Kit

Deer ticks infest rural and suburban communities across the United States – and many of these pests carry the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. To complicate this serious public health problem, diagnosing Lyme infections in humans and dogs can be tricky. It’s far easier to detect the infection in the ticks themselves.

Hence the Lyme-Aid Diagnostic Test Kit, brainchild of Melissa Shaw, a former grad student at Pennsylvania’s East Stroudsburg University. With her mentor Jane Huffman, microbiology professor and head of the ESU-affiliated Northeast Wildlife DNA Laboratory, Shaw had analyzed ticks that had bitten people or dogs. Technicians can immediately distinguish between deer ticks and other species, and need just two or three days to determine with a 99.9 % degree of confidence if a deer tick is a Lyme carrier.

That information, potentially available before any symptoms appear in a bitten person, can be decisive in judging whether to begin antibiotic treatment. (Left untreated, Lyme may cause serious long-term health effects, including paralysis of facial muscles, pain or swelling in the joints, abnormal heart rhythm, and memory disorders.) If tests find no Lyme-causing pathogens, treatment may be unnecessary.

But how to get a tick from skin bite to lab? Shaw and Huffman devised a collection kit that included a tick remover, an alcohol wipe, a specimen bag and labels, a tick testing form, and a preaddressed submittal envelope.

So far, Lyme-Aid was just an excellent idea and a handful of parts. The greater need for commercial success: to produce an organized, appealing package and the means to market it successfully. To manage this critical phase, the lab called on MTS. Conceiving and delivering a compact, well-conceived container was only one need; to be an effective product, Lyme-Aid would also need an appealing, informative  visual identity and high-notice packaging.

MTS fitted the multi-item kit into a slim, convenient, molded-plastic box. A display stand was developed to offer the kit at point of purchase or elsewhere in sporting goods and outdoors shops. An eye-catching appearance, featuring the MTS-designed Lyme-Aid logo and important supporting information, ensures that sportsmen, hikers, campers, birders, pet owners and nature lovers generally will see and purchase this invaluable product.

“Matt took the idea that we had and found a way to make it enticing to the public,” Huffman said. “His creativity in putting it all together was stellar.”

For her part in developing the kit, Melissa Shaw won an award from the university recognizing her entrepreneurial imagination and drive. For those who love the outdoors, there’s a greater prize – a legitimate safeguard against the debilitating effects of Lyme disease.