Flying Syringes- Genetically Modified Mosquitoes as vaccinators
In 2008, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $100,000 to Hiroyuki Matsuoka of Jichi Medical University in Japan to do research on genetically modified mosquitoes. If he proves that his idea has merit, he will be eligible for an additional $1 million of funding.
The study relies a mechanism: Use mosquitoes to become what the scientists call “flying vaccinators.” Normally, when mosquitoes bite, they inject a tiny drop of saliva that prevents the host’s blood from clotting. The Japanese group decided to add an antigen-a compound that triggers an immune response-to the mix of proteins in the insect’s saliva.
They were producing a transgenic mosquito, a flying syringe, to deliver a vaccine protein to human beings via the saliva the mosquito deposits in the skin while biting. The mosquito produces a vaccine protein in the salivary gland (SG) and deposits the protein into the host’s skin when it takes the host’s blood. They chose circumsporozoite protein (CSP), currently the most promising malaria vaccine candidate, to be expressed in the SG of Anopheles stephensi. To transform the mosquitoes, plasmid containing the CSP gene under the promoter of female SG-specific gene, as well as the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene under the promoter of 3xP3 as a selection marker in the eyes, was injected into more than 400 eggs. As a result, five strains of GFP-expressing mosquitoes were established, and successful CSP expression in the SG was confirmed in one strain. The estimated amount of CSP in the SG of the strain was 40 ng per mosquito. We allowed the CSP-expressing mosquitoes to feed on mice to induce the production of anti-CSP antibody. However, the mice did not develop anti-CSP antibody even after transgenic mosquitoes had bitten them several times. They consider that CSP in the SG was not secreted properly into the saliva. Further techniques and trials are required in order to realize vaccine-delivering mosquitoes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20802540/
There’s a huge variation in the number of mosquito bites one person received compared with the next, so people exposed to the transgenic mosquitoes would get vastly different doses of the vaccine; it would be a bit like giving some people one measles jab and others 500 of them.
No regulatory agency would sign off on that, says molecular biologist Robert Sinden of Imperial College London. Releasing the mosquitoes would also mean vaccinating people without their informed consent, an ethical no-no. Yoshida concedes that the mosquito would be “unacceptable” as a human vaccine-delivery mechanism.
How far this program went and how it was used is unknown, but Covid experience showed that there are no moral boundaries in this world and anything is possible in the name of science and money. Don’t even mention the agenda behind.
DB
