Assistant Professor of Insect Physiology Daniel Swale is looking for a way to stop ticks from producing spit, which carries disease-causing pathogens, in an attempt to curb increasing rates of Lyme disease and other illnesses caused by tick bites.
“Our ultimate goal is to see if we can develop insecticides, and bugs are also used as a model for mammalian diseases,” Swale said. “[We are] trying to figure out how their systems work to develop new drugs targeting that particular system and to understand the basic biology of them better.”
Swale and his team are aiming to shut down ticks’ salivary glands. First, they measure the amount of saliva secreted before they remove the salivary gland. They measure the the amount of saliva secreted before and after they apply the chemical or drug that they have developed.
Swale and his team continue to develop drugs and chemicals that target a specific physiological pathway in ticks’ salivary gland, aiming to figure out the amount of saliva that ends up being generated.
This process is the same with neurons. A lot of insecticides and drugs in the pharmacy target the nervous system. The team will take the brain out of a fly or a mosquito, and track the electrical activity of the particular system before and after they put their chemical on it.
“It comes down to the fact that there is not much of a difference between bugs and people, with regard to the inner workings of their systems,” Swale said.
Their goal is to either rescue the function in humans with neurodegenerative diseases or destroy the bodily functions of the insect, which will kill and serve as an insecticide.
Swale and his team are also developing methods to keep honey bees, which are the world’s most important pollinator, from dying.
Swale said he has always been interested in how things work and that is exactly what his lab works to do.
Ultimately, through the development of chemistry, Swale hopes to mitigate some health problems that affect ordinary people.
“The overarching idea of my research program is to bridge this fundamental gap between insect toxicology and insect physiology with its counterpart of human physiology and human pharmacology to see what we can take from the human world and apply it to the insect world,” Swale said.
