URI’s Thomas N. Mather in the lab with graduate student Emily Troiano, who is assisting with his research on ticks.

The Providence Journal Kathy Borchers

To that great majority of us who experience ordinary disgust (if not outright horror) when beholding the tick, Thomas N. Mather’s long fascination with these bloodsucking disease carriers seems terribly wrong.

Until he begins to explain.

His office at the University of Rhode Island, where he is a professor of entomology and microbiology, is filled with reminders of these small but virtually ubiquitous arachnids: tick books, tick posters, tick sprays, tick-repellent socks and pants, a plush tick toy the size of a softball, a baseball cap with the slogan, “Ticks Suck!” Mather takes that literally.

“I just think they’re pretty amazing,” says this respected biologist, whose research has brought millions of dollars in federal and private grants to Rhode Island.

Mather, 54, talks about tick saliva, which the creature deposits under your skin when it sinks its mandibles and teeth-lined feeding tube in –– about the thousands of different molecules it contains and the promise some could hold for medicine. Anticoagulants, to keep blood from clotting while the eight-legged parasite eats (it likes just one food, blood). Painkillers, so the host feels nothing. An angiogenesis inhibitor, which slows or prevents blood-vessel formation, a molecule that could prove useful in preventing the growth of tumors.

“Ticks, unlike all other bloodsuckers, have to be attached for long periods of time –– days –– in order to steal their blood. Most other things, like mosquitoes, are sort of quick-in, quick-out. They didn’t have to evolutionarily invest in painkillers because they have wings and can fly off and find something else.

“Well, a tick has no wings. If it gets scratched off because it hurts when it starts to bite, its likelihood of finding another host isn’t going to be very good. It will be lost. There’s strong selective pressure for being hidden, undercover. Tiny size, no pain, provides for an opportunity to successfully feed and reproduce.”

Yes, pretty amazing, from a creature that early in its life cycle (of two years) is almost too small to see.

Mather’s fascination began nearly three decades ago, when he was a graduate student studying under a professor with a passion for parasites. Lyme disease, carried by ticks, was beginning to show up on the public-health radar screen.

“I always wanted to do something that people cared about,” Mather says. “People care about getting sick. This seemed like a good merge.”

As a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health in the 1980s, Mather began investigating the newfound disease. “There were lots of questions and few answers,” he says. “I feel like I was very fortunate to kind of get in on the ground floor.”

WE LEAVE Mather’s office and descend to his lab, where graduate student Emily Troiano is bent over a microscope, tiny scalpels in hand. She is dissecting the salivary glands from deer tick nymphs, the poppy seed-size stage that follows larva (which hatch from eggs, laid by a bloated mother). Troiano and Mather’s team have harvested thousands of these glands, for use in small-animal experiments.

This part of Mather’s research could lead to a vaccine against ticks, which can carry the pathogens that cause not only Lyme disease but other potentially crippling afflictions, including babesiosis and anaplasmosis. The research is being conducted with scientists from the National Institutes of Health and the Providence-based biomedical firm EpiVax. Initial results, Mather says, are promising, though it is likely that human clinical trials are several years away.

If successful, the tick vaccine would provide defense against many tick-borne diseases (including Lyme) by eliciting an immune response that would make a bite site “a very inhospitable place for pathogens to come in,” Mather says. “Instead of getting into a house where everybody is sleeping,” a colleague at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jose Ribeiro put it in a 2003 newspaper story, “you get into a house where everybody is shooting and you get caught in the crossfire.”

Mather brings us to one of the refrigerators where he keeps his living ticks in plastic bottles. They can last months on a single meal.

“This is what’s left from this year,” he says. “I collected probably 9,000 or 10,000 adult-stage ticks –– there’s still several hundred here. They’re starting to not be very good any more because they’ve been around for a year. We keep them cold to keep them from moving. An extended winter.”

Mather captures his specimens from woods near URI. “I see about two-thirds of them on the branches,” he says. “And the rest of them get on my pants and I just pick them off.” With pointy tweezers, he notes.

He brings us to another refrigerator.

“These are engorged females. Once we get them from nature we bring them into the lab and feed them on animals. They take their blood meal and grow about 100 times in size. These actually will lay about 1,500 eggs.”

“Horrifying,” we say.

Mather laughs wickedly.

DURING his long career, Mather has been bitten hundreds of times –– sometimes deliberately (by pathogen-free ticks) as an experimental subject himself, and other times unintentionally in the wild. He has contracted Lyme disease, and been cured by antibiotics, an effective treatment if begun early.

With a tick vaccine still beyond the horizon but disease a threat today, Mather’s first line of defense is public education. He speaks frequently to groups, appears often in the media, and promotes protection through a web site, tickencounter.org. There, visitors can learn Mather’s mantra: “Think TICK… take ACTION!”

The action involves Tweezers (for safe removal); Inspect (check your body at least once a day); Clothing repellent (use clothing infused with permethrin, a safe and effective tick repellent/killer); and Kill the critters (by spraying yards). Ninety-percent of the residents of South Kingstown, Mather says, live within 100 yards of tick habitat.

“The short-term, immediate solution to the tick problem,” Mather says, “is we need to figure out how to get people to protect themselves from tick bites. In the long term, we’ll solve this with an anti-tick vaccine.”

Meanwhile, Mather’s fascination with humanity’s ancient parasitic sparring partner will continue.

“Over time, this war, this battling back and forth –– stealing blood, protecting from stealing blood, stealing blood, protecting from stealing blood –– has caused the tick’s salivary glands to harbor thousands and thousands of bioactive compounds. The salivary glands in ticks are like a treasure trove of pharmacologically active agents.”

Some pharmaceutical firms, Mather says, have shown interest in developing them for use in medicine. And that could shift near-universal disgust closer to the more favorable sentiment this scientist holds.

More on Mather, his work, and ticks in general at www.tickencounter.org

gwmiller@projo.com