Link: MIT Women’s League Stratton Lecture (March 3, 2026)

Dr. Michal (Mikki) Tal was featured in MIT’s Stratton Lecture series, highlighting her research on the biological links between infections and chronic disease as part of MIT’s leading public science lecture program.

Link: Tick Boot Camp podcast episode 555 (February 21, 2026)

“MAESTRO stands for Measure Absolutely Everything. That’s how we make invisible illness visible.” - Mikki Tal

“Borrelia can tap the immune system’s brakes—that’s how it survives.” - Mikki Tal

Link: The Tech (February 19, 2026)

“B. burgdorferi infection causes several gynecologic pathologies in humans and increases the risk for heavy menstrual bleeding, miscarriage, uterine fibroids, and endometriosis.”

“The findings suggest persistent infection can reshape reproductive health in ways medicine has largely overlooked.”

Link: The CGR article - compilation video (December 15, 2025)

“‘The reason chronic Lyme is an ‘invisible illness’ is because we don’t have the tests to measure it,’ Tal noted during the session. ‘At MIT, we are rooted in engineering. We are looking at this as a set of solvable problems.’”

Link: Bay Area Lyme Spotlight Series (November 17, 2025)

“Dr. Tal’s team discovered severe uterine infections in female mice with chronic Lyme, launching investigations into links between infection, fibroids, endometriosis, and fertility problems.”

“Borrelia are masters of immune evasion, and Tal’s research is uncovering how these bacteria manipulate immune checkpoints and persist in the body.”

Link: Tick Boot Camp podcast episode 537 (September 27, 2025)

“For too long patients were told their symptoms were psychological, but the biology we’re measuring shows these illnesses are real.”

“We’re moving beyond simple yes-or-no antibody tests to develop biomarkers that can actually guide treatment decisions.”

Link: The Wall Street Journal (July 20, 2025)

“What we’re trying to do is measure everything… I want to find a way to give people hope.”

Link: Make Visible: Chronic Illness Explored podcast #16 (June 13, 2025)

“We’re trying to understand who is at risk of developing chronic illness after infection—and why.”

“Complex illnesses emerge from the interaction of pathogens, immunity, genetics, and environment.”

Link: Neurologist Mom on YouTube (March 15, 2025)

“The concept behind this clinical study is really to leave no stone unturned. The idea here is that we are just admitting that we don’t understand what is going wrong and we are looking at everything and collecting everything.”

Link: Bay Area Lyme Foundation (September 4, 2024)

“I want to leave you with hope. I think we’re going to be unstoppable because I think that these are solvable problems. These are answerable questions. I think that there are already a lot of existing tools in immunology that just need to be brought into the fight, and we can change this.”

Link: Microbe TV - Immune Booster podcast #2 (July 9, 2024)

“‘What got you into science?’…
’I was an undergrad, and I took an immunology class and I was just, like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life… The answers are here.’ - Mikki Tal”

Link: Marketplace (May 23, 2024)

“Long COVID can cause many diverse and fluctuating symptoms, it can impact multiple organ systems, and it has no official treatments” - Beth Pollack

Link: Important, Not Important podcast (May 20, 2024)

“That [this female sex skew in chronic lyme] meant that this wasn’t a real disease. That this biological difference that we should have used as a clue… I look at this and I’m like oh! Does this mean it’s testosterone? What is it that is protecting men? But that’s not where they took it…they took it as this means that it isn’t real.”

Link: Time Magazine (May 16, 2024)

“‘The chronic Lyme community is trying to grasp onto what’s happening right now with Long COVID and hold on for dear life,’ Tal says. ‘If Long COVID is real, and Long COVID looks [almost] exactly like chronic Lyme, then do we need to go back and reassess some of our assumptions about chronic Lyme?’”

“But right now, doctors don’t know why treatment sometimes fails, or for whom it will; some outright reject the idea that treatments don't always work. ‘Instead of admitting that it fails 10% of the time, we have just been sweeping this under the rug and calling these people crazy,’ Tal says.”

Link: Harvard Business Review IdeaCast podcast episode 967 (May 14, 2024)

“Long COVID comes with a lot of loss. So for many people they lose their health and they lose their ability and their functionality to do so many things. But a big part of that loss in that grief also includes too often losing one’s career and losing one’s livelihood.” - Beth Pollack

Link: Nature news feature (April 2, 2024)

“‘There’s a lot of complexity in these illnesses, and I think it’s really important to embrace these complexities,’ says Beth Pollack, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, whose work focuses on understanding long COVID and other infection-associated chronic illnesses. With conditions that have a range of symptoms, and for which there is only limited research, building a knowledge base starts by listening to patients’ stories and capturing the nuances of their conditions, Pollack says.'“

Link: NBC Boston (March 28, 2024)

“Researchers have discovered through years of study that a protein found in our sweat has antimicrobial properties, and can inhibit the growth of the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.

They believe this type of protein could be put into a topical cream to make something called ‘Lyme block’ — like sunblock, but for preventing Lyme.

‘Ideally what we would love to do is give people more control over their own risk,’ Michal "Mikki" Tal said, a principal research scientist at MIT and the leader of this study. ‘And really try to develop this into a possible preventative that you could put on repellant or sunblock to protect against other elements of the outdoors that you could also protect yourself against Lyme.’"

Link: STAT news (March 15, 2024)

“A growing number are calling for increased research funding and a new NIH body to study chronic conditions that follow infections.”

“The proposal concretizes the concerns and demands of tens of thousands of Americans with little-understood conditions.”

Link: MIT Technology Review (February 28, 2024)

“Long covid looks exactly, and I mean exactly, like chronic Lyme. One is caused by bacteria, and one is caused by a virus.”

“Does it matter which road you took to Rome? Or does it only matter that you’re in Rome?”

Link: Medscape Medical News (February 28, 2024)

"These illnesses are underfunded and understudied relative to their disease burdens." - Beth Pollack

Link: The New York Times (February 21, 2024)

“‘These are well-established pathologies and really central to ME/CFS,’ Ms. Pollack said, adding ‘so this did not address everything, and it contradicted some things that we know.’”

‘Experts said the study, which is the N.I.H.’s first detailed look at ME/CFS, should be considered only one step in understanding the condition, its severity and potential remedies. ‘We must advance the field towards research on treatment,’ Ms. Pollack said.”

Link: Medscape Medical News (January 19, 2024)

“The Tal Research group at MIT… is conducting a large study looking into both Lyme disease and long COVID. The goals are to identify biomarkers that can predict who will not recover and to advance available treatments.”

Link: The Boston Globe (August 29, 2023)

“Long COVID and chronic Lyme share so many features that it’s uncanny.” - Mikki Tal

“This could be a diagnostic for chronic Lyme,” she said, referring to the distinct “antibody signature” she sees early in the infection of people who will go on to develop chronic Lyme. “There is an incredible similarity to the signature people have a decade later who did not recover.”

Link: The Atlantic (September 26, 2022)

“‘We’re adding an immense volume of patients to an already dysfunctional and overburdened system,‘ Beth Pollack, a scientist at MIT who studies complex chronic illnesses”

Link: LymeDisease.org (February 10, 2022)

“All the top symptoms in long Lyme are present in both MCAS and long COVID.” - LymeDisease.org

Link: The New York Times (February 3, 2022)

“Nasal vaccines may be the best way to prevent infections long term.:

“They provide protection where the virus first lands - the mucosal linings of the airways”