Mosquito modification programme aiming to eliminate malaria receives US$15m

Tags: Africa, Gene drive, Malaria
Hayley Dunning, Imperial College London, 2023.

Half of the world’s population is at risk of contracting malaria, a disease caused by parasites that are transmitted from one person to another through bites from Anopheles mosquitoes. In 2021 alone, there were over 247 million cases and 619,000 deaths from malaria, mostly children under five years old in sub-Saharan Africa.

With current measures failing to halt disease transmission, new ways to control the spread of malaria are desperately needed. Transmission Zero is a global programme led by scientists at Imperial College London (Imperial) and the Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) of Tanzania, in partnership with the Tanzanian National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR), which aims to modify specific species of mosquitoes so that they are unable to transmit the disease.