This article was taken from the January 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Haydn Parry genetically modifies mosquitoes in the hope that they will breed themselves out of existence. "Dengue fever cases have grown 30-fold in the past 50 years," says the 54-year-old CEO of Oxitec, a biotech company based in Abingdon, near Oxford. "But the larvicides and insecticides used are the same as they were 50 years ago."
Parry's alternative is to get the mosquitoes to give birth to infertile offspring. Oxitec has bred (and patented) genetically modified strains of two mosquitos:
Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, each of which is a vector in the spread of yellow fever, dengue fever and chikungunya. The modified genes cause the overproduction of a protein called tTA, which disrupts normal cell behaviour and causes the males' offspring to die before they reach adulthood.
In tests carried out in the Cayman Islands in 2010 by the Mosquito Research and Control Unit, a government body, introducing the modified insects reduced the mosquito population by 80 per cent after 16 weeks. In 2013, field trials in northern Brazil, overseen by researchers from the University of São Paulo, achieved a 96 per cent reduction in Dengue mosquitoes in six months.
Parry, a former head of R&D for the seed company Advanta, understands anxieties about GM species released into the wild. The difference here, he says, is in the outcome. "We are breeding these mosquitos with a huge disadvantage" he says. "They are designed to die out."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
