Associated organisationsIND Ana Ibarrola Vannucci 70813 · IND Antonieta Rojas de Arias 26608 · IND Christian Schaerer 268395 · Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé Direction Régionale de l'Ouest · Ministry of Health, Malaysia · University of Glasgow · The University of MelbourneEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£5.0M
PeriodNov 2022 — Oct 2027
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Dengue-carrying mosquitoes are being infected with a bacterial strain called wAlbB that blocks them from transmitting the virus to humans. This matters because dengue fever sickens millions of people each year in tropical and subtropical regions, and existing control methods—insecticides and removing breeding sites—are expensive, hard to sustain, and losing effectiveness as mosquitoes develop resistance. The Wolbachia approach offers a self-spreading, biological alternative: once released, infected mosquitoes pass the bacterium to their offspring, gradually replacing the wild population with virus-blocking ones. If this research succeeds, local health authorities in Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa could run affordable, low-tech dengue control programmes without constant insecticide spraying or foreign expertise. The team is also developing cheap field tests to monitor Wolbachia levels and insecticide resistance, plus traps that selectively kill uninfected mosquitoes. An economic evaluation will tell funders and governments which deployment strategy delivers the most protection per pound spent. The findings will apply directly to other Wolbachia-based programmes worldwide, making dengue control more sustainable in the hot climates where the disease hits hardest.
View original technical description
The principal goal is to facilitate affordable and sustainable, locally- focused and locally-managed dengue control programmes, by releasing Ae. aegypti mosquitoes carrying Wolbachia maternally inherited symbionts to block virus transmission. The Wolbachia strain used in Ae. aegypti will be wAlbB, together with selective targeting of Ae. albopictus with other strains. Strategies will be tested in contrasting Southeast Asian, South American and African settings, to ensure broad applicability to dengue control within an operational framework. Our primary aims will be to identify mosquito backgrounds that minimize Wolbachia fitness costs; explore novel combinations of male-biased releases for suppression and replacement of Ae. aegypti and Aedes albopictus; develop guidelines for maintaining release stock quality; develop attract-and-kill traps that preferentially target wildtype mosquitoes; develop low-cost, high-throughput Wolbachia and insecticide resistance monitoring methodologies based on LAMP technology; and carry out economic evaluations to determine the optimal approaches for roll-out. The results will help improve and promote the use of wAlbB as the Wolbachia strain of choice for use in dengue control in high temperature settings, although the data obtained will also be directly relevant to other programmes using different Wolbachia strains.
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