Acadia will be home to the only dedicated tick-breeding facility in Canada
Most people would panic at the idea of spending their career surrounded by thousands of ticks, but for Nicoletta Faraone, it’s a dream come true.
Faraone, associate professor of chemistry, will lead the Canadian Tick Research and Innovation Center at Acadia University.
While Faraone’s team is currently studying ticks, the new facility will be a dedicated research center focused on breeding ticks, repellent testing, and research on tick-borne diseases. This will be the first facility of its kind in Canada.
“This is very important for public safety,” Faraone said. “We are well aware, particularly for Nova Scotia, that this is the province with the highest number of ticks per capita, and they can be a burden to public health.”
Researchers rely on lab-bred ticks because this ensures they are disease-free.
Currently, Faraone said, there is only one known facility that breeds ticks in North America. The tick-rearing facility at Oklahoma State University sells them for $5 each.
The research center in Acadia will officially open in the spring, but Faraone said it will take a year to stock up on ticks and begin work.
Luis Anholetto, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry, will be the laboratory manager.
He said it is common to use 1,000 ticks in an experiment, so the cost of purchasing them from the US limits their potential.
“Having this local ticker will also allow us to work with strains that actually exist here, so it will make our research relevant to public health across Canada and to Nova Scotia,” Anholetto said.
Those strains include blacklegged and dog ticks.
The team first tried to start Tikri three years ago, but were denied when they applied for funding.
major donations
Faraone’s hopes were fading when he received news that donors in Ontario were offering to foot the bill. Peter and Susan Gordon are donating $755,000, which will get the project started.
“It was a dream come true,” Faraone said. “It’s very rewarding that people believe in science.”
Faraone said that ideally, she would like to have three full-time employees to work at Tikri, but she would need more money to do that. Their aim is to become financially self-reliant in five years by selling tikkis.
Anholetto is equally thrilled with the opportunity.
“I fell in love with ticks when I was an undergraduate student,” he said. He laughed and said that working with thousands of ticks is not as scary as one might think.
She is determined to learn as much as she can about preventing tick-borne diseases from spreading further.
“I am someone who is also interested in finding new solutions to protect human beings.”
The team in Wolfville, NS, will test repellents and research tick-borne diseases, but it will also breed thousands of the insects to send to researchers around the world. Watch Amy Smith’s interview with Nicoletta Faraone, who will lead the Canadian Tick Research and Innovation Centre.
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