New At-Home Tick Test Could Detect Lyme Disease in Under 30 Minutes

A Tick Bite No Longer Means a Waiting Game

For the roughly 31 million Americans who get tick bites every year, the anxiety that follows has always come with a frustrating delay — days or even weeks waiting for lab results, or an expensive trip to the doctor just to find out the tick wasn't even a carrier. A new at-home test kit launching this month aims to change that equation entirely.

Erin Dawicki, a physician associate and MIT fellow, is the founder of LymeAlert, a startup whose test can detect the Lyme bacterium from a crushed tick in about 15 minutes. A limited batch of 5,000 kits is shipping in August. The kit is priced at $49.99 per test. For context, laboratory tick testing through traditional channels can cost anywhere from $50 to $450 and require a week or more for results.

How the Test Actually Works

The test is painless for humans, but hard on ticks — it comes with a plastic container and a built-in grinder. It is a single-use lateral flow assay intended to detect Borrelia burgdorferi in ticks — the same bacteria responsible for causing Lyme disease. The process is designed to be as simple as a COVID-19 or pregnancy test: remove the tick, crush it, and read the result strip.

The startup's design pairs a sealed "tick crusher" with a rapid test strip and an app that links users to clinicians for follow-up. The companion app is designed to offer telehealth connections so users can quickly talk through antibiotics and other next steps within what the company describes as a 72-hour treatment window. That window matters enormously — early antibiotic intervention can significantly reduce the risk of Lyme disease progressing into a chronic condition.

Why Early Detection Is So Critical

According to CDC estimates, approximately 476,000 people are diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease each year — but many more cases go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. Lyme disease remains a growing concern, particularly in areas of high prevalence like the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and upper Midwest. This spring, the CDC reported a spike in tick-borne-illness-related emergency room visits, with Lyme disease being the most common diagnosis.

Lyme disease symptoms — fatigue, brain fog, relentless pain — can take weeks to appear. By that point, the window for the most effective treatment has often closed. While over half of ticks in Massachusetts carry Lyme disease, nearly half do not — and an unnecessary doctor visit costs money, while unnecessary doses of antibiotics increase the risk that diseases will become more resistant to the drug. That tension is precisely what inspired Dawicki to develop the kit in the first place.

Promising, But Not a Doctor's Replacement

Clinical guidelines caution that finding the bacterium in a removed tick does not reliably predict whether the person who was bitten will actually develop Lyme disease. The Infectious Diseases Society of America and partner medical societies recommend that clinicians do not use tick-test results as the sole basis for deciding on treatment. The LymeAlert tick test is intended for informational purposes only and has not been evaluated or approved by the FDA.

LymeAlert is also preparing to raise a seed round to support further research and development — specifically, developing a multiplexed version of the kit that can detect multiple pathogens from a single tick and test strip. Ticks can transmit dozens of diseases, including anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and alpha-gal syndrome — meaning a future multi-pathogen version of this test could have sweeping implications for how Americans respond to tick bites across the board. For now, even a single-pathogen, 30-minute answer is a significant leap forward for millions of people who spend time outdoors.