Professor Raymond St. Leger and post doctoral student Weiguo Fang use different strains of fungi their research to combat malaria and lyme disease.
With the help of university research, malaria may have met its match.
For the past two years, entomology professor Raymond St. Leger and research associate Weiguo Fang have been genetically engineering a fungus species to attack the malaria-causing parasite on mosquitoes — a fungus they hope can be used to combat other bug-borne diseases in the future. They have partnered with researchers at Johns Hopkins’ public health school and the University of Westminster in London in their enterprise.
In a lab on this campus, St. Leger and Fang inserted a fungus that naturally attacks mosquitoes into genes for a human antibody and a toxin found in scorpions, both of which are known to target the malaria-causing parasite. Researchers at Johns Hopkins then applied the genetically engineered fungus carrying anti-malarial genes to mosquitoes infected with the malaria parasite and found encouraging results.
“We can take a mosquito with an advanced infection, and within a couple of days, the mosquito is cleared of the infection,” St. Leger said.
St. Leger said the findings, published in the Feb. 24 issue of Science magazine, suggest their method of preventing the insect-to-human transfer of malaria, which kills about a million people every year, is more effective than killing the infected mosquitoes with chemical insecticides, to which Fang said they can become resistant relatively easily.
“The big problem with chemical insecticides is mosquitoes are resistant to these types of chemicals, so we need a new way to control mosquitoes,” Fang said.
St. Leger added that the new technology is no more expensive than insecticides and could actually be used alongside insecticides to effectively evade the problem of mosquitoes developing resistance.
In addition, St. Leger said the new treatment for mosquitoes is a model that could potentially be emulated to fight other devastating bug-borne diseases, such as Lyme disease from ticks. He said the use of genetically engineered fungi in insect control has already proven to be an effective method elsewhere in the world — such as Africa, China and Australia, where a similar fungus is already being used to control locusts.
“What probably works for malaria should work for other vector-borne diseases,” St. Leger said.
St. Leger said if the fungus is successful at targeting the malaria parasite on infected mosquitoes outside of the lab, mosquitoes could eventually become resistant to malaria and make the deadly disease history.
The next step in that process will be to infect mosquitoes in Africa and China with the fungus.
“Mosquitoes probably cause more human misery than any other organism,” he said. “We would really like to take this technology forward.”
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