For as long as humans have kept records of suffering, the mosquito has been among our most relentless adversaries — carrying malaria, dengue, and Zika across half the inhabited world. Now, a team at Penn State, backed by $2.8 million from the National Institutes of Health, is pursuing a different kind of answer: not killing mosquitoes, but rewriting them. By engineering artificial symbioses and refining viral gene-delivery systems, Jason Rasgon and his colleagues are asking whether the tools of molecular biology can accomplish what nets, pesticides, and public health campaigns alone have not.
NIH Awards $2.8M to Penn State Mosquito Genetics Research Targeting Disease Control
Mosquito-borne diseases cause approximately 600,000 deaths annually and infect hundreds of millions, with dengue affecting half the global population at risk.