An Efficient Production Process for Extracting Salivary Glands from Mosquitoes

TL;DR

This paper presents a mechanical device designed to automate and speed up the dissection of mosquitoes for malaria vaccine production, significantly increasing efficiency and reducing labor costs.

Contribution

Introduction of a novel mechanical device that automates mosquito dissection, enabling simultaneous processing of twenty mosquitoes and reducing dissection time.

Findings

Dissects 20 mosquitoes simultaneously

Reduces dissection time per mosquito

Simplifies the dissection process for technicians

Abstract

Malaria is the one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in many developing countries. The development of a highly effective and readily deployable vaccine represents a major goal for world health. There has been recent progress in developing a clinically effective vaccine manufactured using Plasmodium falciparum sporozoites (PfSPZ) extracted from the salivary glands of Anopheles sp. Mosquitoes. The harvesting of PfSPZ requires dissection of the mosquito and manual removal of the salivary glands from each mosquito by trained technicians. While PfSPZ-based vaccines have shown highly promising results, the process of dissection of salivary glands is tedious and labor intensive. We propose a mechanical device that will greatly increase the rate of mosquito dissection and deskill the process to make malaria vaccines more affordable and more readily available. This device consists of several components: a sorting stage in which the mosquitoes are sorted into slots, a cutting stage in which the heads are removed, and a squeezing stage in which the salivary glands are extracted and collected. This method allows mosquitoes to be dissected twenty at a time instead of one by one as previously done and significantly reduces the dissection time per mosquito.