ITHACA, N.Y. -- Laura Harrington, a medical entomologist at Cornell University, is a member of a global team of scientists that has been offered a $19.7 million grant from the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. The team is working on devising and deploying novel genetic strategies to control the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which transmits dengue fever.
The project is among 43 groundbreaking research projects to improve health in developing countries that are supported by $436 million from the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, which was launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2003 in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"Dengue fever is a socioeconomic disease that targets people in the tropics in developing nations," said Harrington, an assistant professor of entomology at Cornell. "Its incidence is on the rise. Our goal is to render the mosquito incapable of transmitting the disease." The illness causes severe joint and back pain, fever and a rash.
Harrington, who has been fascinated with mosquitoes since she was an undergraduate at St. Lawrence University, says the World Health Organization reports 500,000 dengue fever cases each year, and estimates that as many as 50 million people are infected annually. In some parts of the world, the economic impact of dengue fever in terms of disruption to quality of life and economic productive rivals the burden of HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis. In Southeast Asia, where Harrington has conducted research on arthropod behavior since 1995, it is public-health enemy number one.
The team, which is under the leadership of vector biologist Anthony James at the University of California, Irvine, expects to develop control methods that target larvae and adult mosquitoes, alter the mosquito's abilities to transmit dengue viruses, and test and compare the efficacy of the vectors inside secure field cages at international sites approved by local communities and relevant government bodies.
Harrington has experience in both the laboratory and the field. For her $750,000 share of the five-year grant, she will conduct a series of "survivor" and "dating" games on wild and modified mosquitoes by conducting laboratory assessments of mating competition and fitness, establishing field sites and characterizing wild mosquito populations in the field.
The Grand Challenges initiative is a major international effort to achieve scientific breakthroughs against diseases that kill millions of people each year in the world's poorest countries. It was launched with a $200 million grant from the Gates Foundation and NIH to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), which was created by Congress to provide private-sector funds for NIH. It is funded with a $450 million commitment from Gates Foundation, $27.1 million from the Wellcome Trust and $4.5 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Global health experts at the FNIH, the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and CIHR manage the initiative.
The ultimate goal of the initiative is to create "deliverable technologies" -- health tools that are not only effective, but also inexpensive to produce, easy to distribute and simple to use in developing countries.
"Some day we may be able to eliminate dengue as a human illness," says Harrington. "That is the ultimate goal."