Medford, MA, March 18, 2026 – Researchers, clinicians, and policymakers gathered last week in Washington, DC for the inaugural HHS National Conference on Women’s Health, a new national forum focused on advancing research and improving care for health conditions that affect women across the lifespan. The meeting brought together leaders from across government, academia, and the biotechnology sector to discuss emerging scientific advances, diagnostic technologies, and strategies to close longstanding gaps in women’s health research.
Among the speakers was PolyBio Research Foundation President and Research Program Director Dr. Amy Proal, who participated in a panel titled “Lyme Disease & Autoimmune Conditions in Women: Making the Invisible Visible.” The session explored the challenges many women face in obtaining accurate diagnoses for complex chronic illnesses that may involve immune dysfunction or persistent infection.
During the panel, Dr. Proal discussed why standard diagnostic approaches often fail in patients with chronic Lyme disease. Conventional blood tests are designed to detect immune responses or pathogens circulating in the bloodstream. However, evidence from animal models and human studies suggests that when the Lyme pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi persists in the body, it frequently resides within a person’s tissues rather than in their blood.
PolyBio recently held a Banbury meeting to innovate diagnostics for Chronic Lyme and related conditions
“As a result, many patients can appear normal on standard blood tests even when infection persists in tissue sites such as the brain, joints, or other organs,” Proal explained. “This creates a major diagnostic blind spot that can delay recognition and treatment of infection-associated chronic disease.”
This diagnostic challenge may disproportionately affect women, who represent a large proportion of patients diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease and related conditions like Long COVID. Without tools capable of detecting tissue-associated metrics of pathogen persistence in accessible fluids like blood, clinicians often lack the biological evidence needed to correctly confirm chronic infection.
To address this gap, PolyBio Research Foundation is supporting and has helped to develop a next-generation diagnostics program designed to detect tissue-associated pathogens and other drivers of disease in patients with Long COVID. The initiative is drawing on emerging technologies from the cancer liquid biopsy field and other advances in molecular diagnostics that allow researchers to identify small amounts of pathogen RNA, DNA, proteins, or extracellular vesicles released from infected tissues into peripheral biofluids. Efforts are actively underway to extend this diagnostic program into chronic tick-borne/vector-borne illness. Indeed, a recent Banbury meeting led by PolyBio brought together a team of top experts to write a diagnostic roadmap to maximize such efforts.
The HHS National Conference on Women’s Health highlighted growing efforts to improve diagnostics for chronic conditions that disproportionately affect women and have historically been under-studied. For researchers working at PolyBio on the intersection of infection and chronic disease, these advances represent a key step toward making these often invisible conditions visible – and ultimately treatable.
About PolyBio Research Foundation
We are a 501(c)(3) advancing research on how viral, bacterial, and parasite infections drive chronic disease and aging. We build collaborative projects that identify, diagnose, and treat root causes of infection-associated chronic illness. Focus areas include Long COVID, chronic tick/vector borne illness, ME/CFS, Alzheimer’s, neuropsychiatric illness, and endometriosis.
PolyBio is proud to drive discovery every day. Our $42M+ in research fund disbursement has catalyzed 50+ projects and 6 clinical trials, with more in the pipeline.