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."

Tedious work; designing robots

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what happens when you raise the minimum wage. All the mosquito head chopping work gets automated.

Re:Just wait till PETA heres about this..

[inasity_rules]

The horror! Won't somebody think of the mosquitos being genocided by killer robots !?

A warm fuzzy feeling inside. Not only because of killer robots and dying mosquitos, but because some idiot at PETA will be annoyed. My day is now complete. :P

Re:Interesting

[Ol Olsoc]

I am interested in exactly how they cut off mosquito heads and empty the salivary glands.

It's very similar to the way they get mothballs.