Scientists building a better mosquito

Genetic tinkering may fight disease

Without mosquitoes, epidemics of dengue fever and malaria could not plague this planet.

The skin-piercing insects infect one person after another while dining on a favorite meal: human blood.

Eliminating the pests appears impossible. But scientists are attempting to re-engineer them so they cannot carry disease. If they manage that, they must create enough mutants to mate with wild insects and one day to outnumber them.

Researchers chasing this dream, including an N.C. State University entomologist, know they may court controversy. Genetically modified crop plants such as soybeans, corn and cotton have become common in the United States, but an altered organism on wings would be a first.

Critics of bio-engineering, especially in Europe, view some genetic alterations as unnatural, even monstrous. People fearful of so-called Frankenfood could sound similar alarms over Frankenbugs.

But with advances in molecular biology and millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this quest may be within reach. And its promise is huge, the scientists say.

"We're looking at a timeline. But this is coming," said Fred Gould, the NCSU insect expert.

Gould is working on the project with scientists on four continents. They landed $19.7 million under a Grand Challenges in Global Health grant offered by the Gates philanthropy and a National Institutes of Health foundation. The funders selected researchers ready to collaborate rather than compete on risky research aimed at solving massive health threats in poor places.

The genetic tinkering is focused at first on dengue, a tropical virus re-emerging in Asia, Latin America and Africa. While dengue claims a fraction of the million or more victims that malaria kills annually, it strikes 50 to 100 million people each year with severe flu symptoms. Outbreaks disrupt families and communities and overburden health systems.

Dengue is a good starting point because it is transmitted almost exclusively by a single mosquito species -- the smallish, striped-legged Aedes aegypti -- while the malaria parasite is carried by several. Focusing the effort on just one bug simplifies the science.

"If you can do this with dengue, you can envision doing it with malaria," Gould said.

To try to build a less dangerous Aedes aegypti, scientists broke a huge job into smaller chunks. First, they needed a means to make female mosquitoes immune to dengue. Only females drink blood (males prefer nectar), and only insects infected with dengue can spread it.

A breakthrough this year at Colorado State University may help. Molecular biologists there stitched laboratory-made DNA into Aedes aegypti that blocks dengue from reproducing in a bug's gut. That stops dengue from getting into mosquito saliva, which deposits the virus into human bloodstreams.

As important, the change sticks. Bugs pass the trait to their offspring.

"Things keep bearing fruit. So far, so good," said Anthony James, a biologist at the University of California Irvine, the lead investigator for the mosquito project.

But inserting strings of DNA into laboratory mosquitoes and spreading them in the wild are two different things.

Scientists must convince the government and people of any country they approach that mutant bugs will fight disease without risk to people or the environment, said Sujatha Byravan, president of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

"On the face of it, it sounds like it would be great. But what would the real effect be?" Byravan said.

And, possibly as daunting, the remaining engineering challenges get complicated.