Robots and Irradiated Parasites Enlisted In the Fight Against Malaria

First time accepted submitter einar.petersen (1178307) writes "Sanaria is a biotechnology company that has developed a new malaria vaccine. To produce the vaccine Sanaria cultivates mosquitos in a sterile environment and infects them with Plasmodium falciparum. When the mosquitos are chock-full of Pf sporozoites, the company irradiates them to weaken the parasites. Workers then herd up the mosquitos, chop off their heads and squeeze out their salivary glands, where the parasites prefer to live the better to port over to the mosquito’s next victim. They retrieve the weakened parasites from these tiny glands, filter out other contaminants and gather them up into an injectable vaccine. Sanaria’s method faces the additional challenge that dissecting the little buggers is tedious. Researchers can dissect 2-3 mosquitos an hour, which is nowhere near enough to mass-produce a global vaccine. So two years ago, Sanaria began working with the Harvard Biorobotics Lab to develop a robot that could do the work faster."

Comments

Re: Hmmm

[Samantha Wright]

That's unfortunately quite a tall order for the Slashdot community. Now, if you'd wish they'd ramble tiresomely about tiny mosquito-decapitating robot overlords running out of control, you might not go home quite so disappointed.

Re:second best

[Ol Olsoc]

Perhaps a decade from now, when the vaccine is available, the poor folks living in these areas can stop cursing at the western do-gooders who got DDT banned.

Yeah, then we can get back to putting lead in gasoline, and treating VD with arsenic.