Marshall Lab receives Gates grant for genetics-based malaria mosquito control

Berkeley Public Health Associate Professor John Marshall, PhD, and Assistant Project Scientist Héctor Sánchez, PhD, have received an $800,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support their lab’s work in genetics-based malaria mosquito control. Malaria, the most devastating mosquito-borne disease, poses a major public health burden throughout much of the world. Novel genetics-based tools that can be shown to be safe and effective would be transformative in eliminating the disease and the suffering it causes. “Malaria continues to be exceptionally difficult to eliminate with currently-available tools,” said Marshall. “Insecticide-treated nets and antimalarial drugs have succeeded in reducing the African malaria burden by about a half, but their impact has stagnated in recent years and new tools are needed. There is now growing recognition that the most promising new tools for malaria elimination are vaccines and gene-edited mosquitoes.”

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