Impacting Billions
-CRISPR: the gene editing tool that’ll impact Billions-
You may be thinking, “What do mosquitos have to do with impacting Billions?”. But in reality they really do have a big role in something. They spread a deadly disease, the spread of malaria. This potentially deadly parasitic disease which kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and we have no cure for it.
SOME BACKGROUND:
Plasmodium falciparum is a protozoan parasite that causes the disease known as malaria. P. falciparum is the most severe strain of the malaria species correlated with almost every malarial death. The other 3 species that cause malaria include: P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae.
The way humans become infected by a female Anopheles mosquito which, transfers a parasitic vector through its saliva into the blood stream. The parasite then infects the liver and undergoes asexual reproduction by insertion into red blood cells causing it to adhere to blood vessels, cytoadherence, as well as to other red blood cells. These affect the tissue which forms a single layer of cells lining various organs and cavities of the body, especially the blood vessels, heart, and lymphatic vessels.
THE RESEARCH
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have used a CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to engineer mosquitos that are resistant to the malaria parasite. By deleting a gene that enables malaria to survive in the mosquito’s gut, the parasite is left unable to survive for long enough to be a danger to humans.
If this works out gene drives in mosquitoes could be used to combat malaria in several ways. For instance, a gene drive could spread a gene in the mosquito population that prevents transmission of the malaria parasite. Alternatively, they could be used to dramatically reduce the size of a mosquito population altogether. And if we can use this for malaria, We can hopefully use the same CRISPR technology that we used for malaria, we can use this for other pathogenic diseases.
