That's a very good question.
We have been doing research looking at the different strains of Borrelia burgdorferi, or genotypes, as they're called. There are minor differences in either the DNA of the organism or the amino acid. We know that there's a range of these different genotypes. We know from work done in the U.S. that there are differences in the rate of whether the strains will disseminate or not and maybe just cause a localized infection, depending on those genotypes.
The easiest source to find those isolates, to look at these genotypes, is to look at the ticks. When we do active surveillance for ticks or we go out in the field and collect ticks, either actively ourselves or through our passive system, we have these ticks that we can look at, the different strains, and we realize when we're looking at an analysis of those genotypes that we have many of the same genotypes that are present in the U.S. It's not surprising, because we feel that these ticks that we see in Canada come through the U.S. and establish populations here. I guess they are transplanted American ticks, in a way. So it's not surprising.
But we are finding that looking at those genotypes in populations that actually do establish, we are seeing some unique differences. We do realize that yes, we have differences in genotypes that come here, and those genotypes may present a disease in a different way, and we're starting to get a better understanding of that. But what we lack at the present time is an understanding of which strains are infecting individuals. So we can look at the ticks, but we don't know how the strains that are present in the ticks are going to present. We need to doing further research looking at the actual strains that are infecting individuals to get a better handle on here's what comes into Canada on an annual basis, here's what is infecting individuals, and here's the clinical presentation to put that whole piece together. Also, we need to look at how our diagnostic tests perform when these individuals are infected with a particular genotype. That's one of the missing elements that we need to do further research on.