One wonders which came first: the crazy idea of vaccinating mosquitoes ( we reported ) or the idea of actually using mosquitoes to vaccinate against a disease for which there is currently only one vaccine, which is also only... 30 to 40% effective: malaria.
Mosquitoes and malaria – a toxic relationship
Malaria parasites and the Anopheles mosquito are inseparable, especially in Africa, where the warm climate favors the growth of the parasite. This wouldn't matter to us if the parasites didn't use humans as an intermediate host.
- The malaria parasites live in the salivary glands of Anopheles mosquitoes
- The mosquitoes bite people, who then become infected with malaria
- Infected people are bitten by the mosquitoes, which in turn ingest the parasites
And then it starts all over again. Effective for the malaria parasites, but unpleasant for humans. Scientists estimate there are over 240 million cases of malaria and over 600,000 deaths each year, making an effective vaccine urgently needed.
A vaccine has also been available since 2021 : RTS,S (better known under the trade name Mosquirix) from the drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline. This was approved by the World Health Organization last year, but only has an effectiveness rate of 30-40%.
The invention of the vaccine mosquito
Mosquitoes and malaria, malaria and mosquitoes… you have to be able to tackle that somehow, right? There have already been experiments with genetically modified mosquitoes that can no longer reproduce - sounds good in experiments, but would be fatal in nature if the food source of many birds and other animals suddenly died out.
Dr. Sean Murphy of the University of Washington in Seattle, lead author of an article in Science Translational Medicine , has considered a different approach: Why not simply equip mosquitoes with weakened parasites that bite people, thereby training their immune systems to deal with the real parasites?
The mosquito vaccine was thus invented!
The insects transmit live, malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites that have been genetically engineered so that they do not make people sick. The body continues to produce antibodies against the weakened parasite so that it is prepared to fight the real parasite.
The first trial with 26 participants and 200 mosquitoes each
The vaccination in the trial went like this: The participants placed their arm over a cardboard box that was filled with 200 mosquitoes and covered with a net that trapped the mosquitoes but still allowed them to bite. In addition, the arm was covered with a black cloth, as mosquitoes prefer to bite at night.

And then the big eating begins - at least for the mosquitoes, it was probably less pleasant for the participants to be bitten in the arm by 200 mosquitoes at the same time.

A promising start
Dr. Murphy believes this experimental mosquito vaccination should trigger a stronger immune response than the WHO-approved RTS,S vaccine because it uses an entire weakened parasite, while GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine targets only one of more than 5,000 proteins, that the parasite produces.
To test how well the approach worked, 14 participants received another round of mosquito bites - this time with the fully functional malaria parasite. Seven of them developed malaria, meaning the vaccine was only 50% effective. For the other seven, protection did not last more than a few months.
Stefan Kappe , one of the authors of the study and a parasitologist at the University of Washington Seattle and the Seattle Children's Research Institute, strongly believes that the effect can be improved by using a vaccine with the weakened parasites in the next trials Administer with a syringe instead of with mosquitoes in order to be able to dose it better.
A more mature version of the parasites used could also have an impact on the effectiveness of the mosquito vaccine agent, giving the immune system more time to prepare for an immune response to the real malaria parasites.
Conclusion
We hope you've read this far (if you have, please comment on Facebook and Twitter with " I love vaccine mosquitoes! "). So of course there won't be any mosquitoes buzzing around secretly vaccinating people. That would also be quite ineffective, because in the experiments alone it took 200 mosquito bites for one vaccination!
But the approach of the trial is definitely original: instead of carrying out long experiments in the laboratory, simply administer the weakened parasites with “vaccine mosquitoes” to see whether it would work at all. And an effect of 50% is not bad for a start and is better than the only vaccine against malaria so far (even if this is not really meaningful with 14 participants).
The correct vaccination is then administered with a syringe. Sorry, vaccination mosquitoes, you'll be unemployed again.
Article image and source:
npr
Also interesting:
It's been buzzing through social media timelines for several years now: the robot mosquito that's spying on us all!
– The buzzing urban legend of the robot mosquito
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