squito splitter

Malaria remains the deadliest vector-borne disease, causing over 400,000 deaths and hundreds of millions of infections each year.

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A number of promising vaccine candidates, and malaria research at large, rely on the production of live malaria parasites.

 

However, these parasites cannot be grown in a petri dish. They must be cycled through mosquitoes, where the malaria parasite evolves and ultimately ends up in the mosquito’s salivary glands.

 

Typically, isolating these parasites is done by hand— with two needles under a microscope. This process is laborious and severely limits the speed of research and vaccine production.

 

Over the course of several years, we built, tested, and patented a robot to automate mosquito dissection for our lab and beyond.

 

Patent #US-20230228653-A1