Despite decades of control and treatment efforts, from DDT to antimalarial drugs, more than one million people die from malaria every year and hundreds of millions more become infected. It seems that as soon as a new tool emerges, a new form of resistance ensues: DDT-resistant mosquitoes made that pesticide powerless, and the number of drug-resistant parasites is on the rise. Some researchers mused that perhaps it was time to reinvent the mosquito itself, and create bioengineered antimalarial mosquitoes.
A team led by Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, made a mosquito that blocks the parasite's transmission. They took SM1, a so-called effector gene that interferes with parasite development, and inserted it into the mosquito genome. They then tested the new insect on a murine malarial model. When SM1 is expressed, it prevents the parasite from traversing the mosquito's midgut wall,1 which it must do to continue its ...
