Thousands of genetically altered mice could be released on Nantucket through an MIT lab for a project known as Mice Against Ticks.

The project is hoping to prevent tick-borne diseases, research states. White-footed mice are responsible for infecting many ticks in eastern North America. Scientists hope that if less mice carry Lyme, then fewer tickets would become infected and would infect less humans.

Introducing antibody-encoding resistance alleles into the local mouse population is anticipated to disrupt the disease transmission cycle for decades, the research reads.

Lyme disease in the U.S. has nearly doubled since 1991, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Maine and Vermont have had the largest increases, followed by New Hampshire, the EPA said.

With so many people suffering from Lyme every single day, which is an awful disease, we need a solution urgently, said Joanna Buchthal, research director of the MIT Media Labs Mice Against Ticks project, told the Boston Globe. This offers a real, if revolutionary, way to tackle the problem.

An MIT professor first presented the idea to the Nantucket board of health in 2016.

At the time, Kevin Esvelt, assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, said that more than 100,000mice could be required for the operation, with groupsof 20,000to 40,000released every two and a half months, Stat News reported.

He aimed for the mice to be released in 2023, the news outlet reported.

But before releasing the mice, field trials will be conducted on several small, largely uninhabited private islands in the region, the Globe reported. And the property owners have to confirmed their participation.

If at any time the community says nope, were not interested, Esvelt said, according to the newspaper. Then we walk away.

And not everyone is for the idea.

My worst fear is that were gonna make a modification that effects a whole chain of reaction in this environment, said Danika Conners, an herbalist and vocal critic of Mice Against Ticks, told CNN in 2018. No matter how much they test this, we do not know how this is gonna affect the environment five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years now, 20 years from now.

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Thousands of genetically altered mice could be released on Nantucket by MIT scientists - MassLive.com