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  Among many honors, Steere has received two awards from the National Institutes of Health, one in 1988 for his discovery of Lyme disease  and the 1999 Astute Clinician Award “for observation of an unusual clinical occurrence, and by investigating it, opening an important new avenue of research.” 
  
  Building further on his experience with Lyme arthritis, Steere is now conducting studies of infection-induced autoimmunity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.With his colleagues Annalisa Pianta and Elise Drouin, he has reported a link between immune responses to a commensal microorganism in the gut microbiome, Prevotella copri, and two novel autoantigens (human proteins) that are highly expressed in joints of rheumatoid arthritis patients.These studies demonstrated molecular mimicry between these microbial and human proteins, and in some cases, Prevotella DNA was found in patients’ inflamed joints, suggesting that the organism itself or components of it may sometimes reach the joints of rheumatoid arthritis patients.