Scientists at the University of Maryland and the Johns Hopkins University have been testing different antimicrobial or peptide blockers that prevents the transmission of the parasitic infection from mosquito to human. What appears to be most effective in animal models is a combination of the antimicrobial with peptide blockers and an antibody. While fungi have been used successfully in the past to fight malaria, the inoculation of the mosquito had to occur within a short timeframe of parasite infection, or the treatment was rendered useless. Using these new engineered fungus, the need to inoculate the mosquitoes shortly after parasitic infection appears to be eliminated. This study has just been published in Science magazine (vol 331:1074).
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