Vijay Sikand

So the vaccine does not work on the bacteria in you.

What it does is the tick sucks up your blood, which has the antibodies in it, kills the bacteria before they can come and infect you.

Yes.

So here we have the vaccine, which is very unusual because it kills the bacteria that cause Lyme disease in the tick before those bacteria can infect you.

Exactly.

Now, as soon as I just started the process of recruiting patients,

I couldn't handle the number that started coming in.

No way.

It was mind-boggling.

I put a little ad in the newspaper, and the phone started ringing off the wall.

I had to get more phone lines.

I had to hire a person just to answer it.

Within a couple of weeks, I cut my work at the hospital in half.

We ended up recruiting 1,200 adults, well, age 15 and over, and had to shut it down because I couldn't handle it anymore.

I had ended up

asking a colleague if he would rent space to me because I needed more space just to see all these patients.

I lured a couple of nurses from the hospital and ended up having a large staff to take care of 1,200 people.

So within about six weeks of that phone call from SmithKline Beecham, I was deeply involved in this study.

So we took the baton and we ran with it.

My wife volunteered.