Transgenic Vector Control vs. Zika Virus...

[Jake]

Dear Colleagues,

Witnessing daily the tragedy and human suffering caused by the Zika virus outbreak, and expecting the news to only get worse as mosquito season approaches and the true human cost is revealed, I feel compelled to devote time and effort into a solution.  As my non-profit and I have a moderately well equipped molecular biology lab, we will be working to develop a vector control solution.

Oxitec has done a lot of work with repressable dominant lethal genes and produced two promising transgenic strains, a sterile male phenotype and a flightless female line.  However, I'm of the opinion that large, publicly traded biotech corporations aren't the best vehicle in which to secure community involvement and are not necessarily oriented towards a permanent solution.

I'd like to develop a strategy for the development of a transforming vector, and then make it available to labs around the world for the actual transformation.  Sort of a crowd sourced strategy to cover the labor involved in microinjection and create a large number of lines from diverse local populations.

To this end, it would be good to exploit positional effects to generate many lines with some variation.  On the other hand, a more permanent solution would be to develop a gene drive system that could more effectively crash the population.  Some good work has been done recently on CRISPR and TALEN based gene drive systems.

Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome...

Female-specific flightless phenotype for mosquito control

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4550

-Jake