UCSD - University of California - San Diego
11/04/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 11/04/2025 11:03
Open Philanthropy Awards Grant for Genetic Technology Designed to Stop Malaria
Story by:
- Mario Aguilera- [email protected]
Published Date
November 04, 2025Article Content
The grantmaking organization Open Philanthropy has awarded funding for a University of California San Diego technology designed to stop the spread of malaria.
The $500,000 grant to School of Biological Sciences Professor Ethan Bier's lab supports the development of a new gene-editing system that blocks mosquitoes from spreading parasites that cause malaria. In 2023, mosquitoes were responsible for a reported 263 million malaria infections, which led to nearly 600,000 deaths, the majority of which were children.
Genetically modified mosquito larvae express fluorescent markers of the FREP1 gene - RFP (pink), GFP (blue) or both (yellow) - to indicate whether they spread or block infection from malarial parasites. Credit: Zhiqian Li, Bier Lab, UC San Diego
The new genetic technology is being developed to complement existing work by the University of California Malaria Initiative, a collaborative effort with researchers from four University of California campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Irvine and San Diego) and Johns Hopkins University.
As announced in July, Bier's Laboratory, in conjunction with researchers at Johns Hopkins University, UC Berkeley and the University of São Paulo, developed a new way of genetically blocking Asian mosquitoes from transmitting malaria. The researchers created a new gene-editing system based on CRISPR technology that stops the malaria-parasite transmission process by changing a single amino acid within a protein in mosquitoes.
Professor Ethan Bier. Credit: Leslie Ariel
By switching just one amino acid (L224) within a protein known as FREP1 with a naturally occurring genetic alternate, or allele (Q224), the parasites are no longer able to spread from one individual to another. With the new funding, Bier and his colleagues will transfer the technology from Asian to African mosquitoes.
"We plan to adapt the highly efficient FREP1 allelic-drive replacement strategy from the Asian mosquito (Anopheles stephensi) to the African vectors (Anopheles gambiae/coluzzii) and to develop drive-mitigating genetic systems to delete or inactivate a gene drive should that be necessary," said Bier.
Similar to a gene-drive, the researchers are also designing a version of the drive technology in which the transgenic element is designed to eventually disappear from the population, leaving only the beneficial allelic variant (one that does not support malaria transmission) in the environment.
Competing interest disclosure: Bier has equity interest in two companies he co-founded: Agragene Inc. and Synbal Inc., which may potentially benefit from the research results.
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