Major new grant to predict the food web consequences of eradicating the mosquitos that transmit malaria

Monday, June 26th, 2017. Posted by Owen Lewis.

The Open Philanthropy Project recently announced the award of a $17M grant to the Target Malaria consortium to assist it develop and prepare for the potential deployment of gene drive technologies in mosquitoes to help eliminate malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa.

About $3M of the Open Philanthropy award has been allocated to understanding the community-ecology consequences of reducing in density, or eliminating, the particular mosquito species that transmit malaria to humans. Fieldwork in Ghana will seek to understand the ecology of these mosquitoes and use modern molecular techniques (such as DNA “barcoding” and metagenomics) to analyse their position in local ecological food webs.

This part of the four-year award will be led by Professor Charles Godfray assisted by Dr Fred Aboagye-Antwi (Accra), CERO’s Professor Owen Lewis (Oxford) and Professor Frédéric Tripet (Keele).

Read more:

Open Philanthropy (http://www.openphilanthropy.org/) and their announcement of this award (http://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/miscellaneous/…).

The Target Malaria project (http://targetmalaria.org/) and Imperial College’s announcement of the award (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummar…).