- Title: Inside the lab breeding malaria-resistant GM mosquitoes
- Date: 12th March 2025
- Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK (MARCH 05, 2025) (Reuters) (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR GEORGE CHRISTOPHIDES, IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON, SAYING: "Interventions are stalling and we definitely need something new. We need a new technology. We need new ideas. We need something that will not need us to be there all the time and do the job. Something that will propagate itself, sustainable
- Embargoed:
- Keywords: Imperial College London Malaria Professor George Christophides Transmission Zero eradicate gene drive genetically modified mosquitoes malaria resistance
- Location: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK / VALENCIA & NAQUERA, SPAIN
- City: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK / VALENCIA & NAQUERA, SPAIN
- Country: UK
- Topics: Europe,Health/Medicine
- Reuters ID: LVA005793711032025RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: An international team of scientists hope their genetically modified mosquitoes could halt the spread of malaria, the world’s most deadly disease.
The Transmission Zero team used gene drive technology to develop a malaria resistant mosquito that passes on its resistance to future generations.
"The program was set up to genetically engineer mosquitoes to make them unable to transmit malaria," Professor George Christophides, who led the research at Imperial College London, told Reuters.
"That's why we're called Transmission Zero, zero transmission, and then to engineer them also to spread that modification in wild populations," he said.
Malaria kills around 600,000 people every year. Of these, 90 percent are children under 5 years old, and 90 percent live in Africa.
Researchers say the fight against the disease has stalled with traditional countermeasures failing due to the growing resistance of mosquitoes and malaria parasites to existing treatments and control methods.
"It's a massive problem. Malaria is the single biggest killer of human beings in the history of humanity," Christophides said.
The Transmission Zero team, led by Imperial, has partners at several institutes: the Ifakara Health Institute and the National Institute of Medical Research in Tanzania, and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Switzerland. They hope their two-stage approach offers a solution.
Stage one renders mosquitoes incapable of transmitting the malaria parasite, while the second ensures that subsequent generations also inherit this resistance.
This self-propagating solution could potentially eliminate the need for additional costly interventions, even reaching parasite-carrying mosquitoes in areas inaccessible to humans.
"You make them genetically modified in the lab. You have a population of mosquitoes. You release them in the field. They will be able to mate with the wild population, with the wild mosquitoes. And when they mate all their progeny who become resistant as well," Christophides said.
The team hope to conduct field trials within the next few years.
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