I don't like to post this on such a great day for fighting global warming, but I am amazed by the news that an effective malaria vaccine has been developed.
Promising Malaria Vaccine Looks to Employ Robots to Mass Produce Its Product
Last year, Sanaria reported that in a Phase I clinical trial whose participants were consenting U.S. veterans, the vaccine administered at the higher of two doses kept all the patients who got it from becoming infected with malaria when bitten by mosquitos carrying Plasmodium falciparum, which causes 98 percent of all malaria deaths. This year, the company will conduct trials in the U.S., Mali, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea and Germany.
To produce the vaccine, called PfSPZ, Sanaria cultivates mosquitos in a sterile environment and infects them with Plasmodium falciparum(the Pf in PfSPZ). When the mosquitos are chock-full of Pf sporozoites (hence the SPZ), 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.
"From our perspective it's a very challenging project," said Yaroslav Tenzer, a post-doc who, with Robert Howe is developing the robot, called SporoBot. "It's small-scale tissue, and they're very soft; they're very fragile."
Tie-in with global warming--predictions are that malaria will creep up into more northern latititudes as the earth warms. Consider
crowdfunding--the life you save may be your own.
Sorry this diary is so short--I don't know enough about the science behind either vaccine production or robotics to add expertise, but I am very excited about this development.