Arizona Researchers Develop Anti-Malaria Mosquito

For water-borne disease such as malaria in particular, environmental improvements that provide clean water, sanitation and controls on standing water provide critical benefits in controlling the rates of infection. Other approaches beyond those that focus on the water component are an important part of the research mix as well.

As we wrote back in November, speakers at the online webcast Advances in Malaria Research: In the Lab and the Field explained that scientists are going after the agents, which carry the disease themselves: the mosquito. Microbiology and immunology professors George Dimopoulos and Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena indicated that genetic research was underway geared toward the development of a mosquito that would be resistant or biologically hostile to the parasite that gives rise to malaria, potentially halting the disease before it can be passed to humans.

According to reporting by Discovery News, it now appears as though that research objective has been successfully attained. Michael Riehle and colleagues at the University of Arizona have developed a genetically modified mosquito that bears a genetic switch programmed to kill the parasite. If successfully released into the environment where they would breed and grow in numbers, the altered mosquito could prevent millions of cases of malaria from occurring.

"We were surprised how well this works," said Riehle. "We were just hoping to see some effect on the mosquitoes' growth rate, lifespan or their susceptibility to the parasite. But it was great to see that our construct blocked the infection process completely."

The lead author of the study, published in the current issue of PLoS Pathogens, cautions that an additional ten years of additional research and testing will likely be required before any such modified mosquitoes are released as a weapon against malaria. But in light of the fact that there are today still some 250 million cases of malaria each year, this innovative breakthrough in genetic engineering holds promise as one potentially valuable new weapon in the broader arsenal global health professionals have at their disposal in the battle against the disease.

Photo by UDSA via Wikimedia Commons.