Malarial vaccine firm seeks crowdfunding for robo-saliva surgeon A team of scientists and engineers is asking for the public's help to fund a robot designed to dissect mosquitos and industrialize the production of the first vaccine for one of mankind's deadliest diseases. The robot prototype, dubbed SpoRobot, is designed to cut the saliva glands out of mosquitos that are infected with the …
I say the mosquito traps designed by NASA and sold so ubiquitously in the US would do a better job. Don't we have enough problems world wide with antibiotics and the like? It was my understanding last I read, that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found these destroyers to be the most cost effective way, short of controlling breeder water sources, to dampen malaria world wide.
I designed a similar version in 1991, that was a sure killer of not only mosquitoes, but a large portion of the stable flies as well! I never patented it, but NASA took the lead in the late 1990s.
While $250,000 is chump change for Bill and Melinda Gates, it is not for most of us. Why doesn't the Gates Foundation fund this vaccine effort? Wasn't finding a viable malaria vaccine one of the reasons Gates founded it? What do the donors get other than a warm fuzzy? Shouldn't they get stock options like other venture capitalists? A viable mass produced malarial vaccine will make this guy the next Jonas Salk.
Robots that dissect mosquitoes, to extract their saliva glands?! Wow! that sounds really REALLY difficult!
I'm no scientist, but what about this -
* research some sugary goop which could be a growth medium and looks like saliva
* put goop in bucket
* seed goop with saliva from one parasite carrying mosquito
* stir vigorously for 2 minutes over low heat
* microwave on high for 1 minute ("irradiate")
* fill syringe
* profit!
Come on - we don't "grow" penicillin on cheese these days... must be some better way of getting those parasites to multiply in numbers...
You can assume that many years of effort have gone into thinking about just this. The trouble is that the Malaria parasite needs something vastly more complex. For a vaccine you need a source of sporozoites - which are what are injected into a human by the mosquito. But sporozoites don't reproduce into more sporozoites. They need to go through a human, and back to a mosquito, via a dozen different life stages, transiting through liver cells, blood cells, and various parts of the mosquito. A sugary gloop is not even vaguely in the hunt. The only way we know to manufacture sporozoites is in a mosquito that has feasted on infected blood. http://www.malariavaccine.org/malvac-lifecycle.php
The life cycle of the Malaria parasite makes that of the Alien look tame.
The story of Florey and Chain and the effort to work out how to grow penicillin (a vastly easier problem, given the mould grows happily on bread) was a major undertaking, for which they shared the Nobel.
They can't just let the parasites multiply in a controlled environment to get a lot of them, rather than having to yank them out of mosquitoes a few at a time?
On the other hand, that is far more satisfying! When they're done making malaria vaccine, can we convert them to duty ripping up flies and let them loose in my house in the summer? Hate getting up to grab a flyswatter and finding the bugger has made himself scarce in the meantime.
...a malaria vaccine that's made by taking parasites from the glands of mosquitos, irradiating them so that they grow to enormous size and kill everybody in the lab, which then has to be bombed by the air-force in order to destroy the mutant monster.
[I guess I ought to have emailed this to the corrections@elreg, but I've done it now.]
Unfortunately there were only 21 people in that trial (6 ppl got 5 shots, 9 got 4 shots, and 6 were not vaccinated).
It is a promising start, but that is all it is, they really need a clinical trial with a much larger number of participants to get a real idea of the effectiveness.
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