Recommendations for Environmental Risk Assessment of Gene Drive for Malaria Vector Control
Wednesday, 2022/07/06 | 05:57:17
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A series of online workshops have identified nine recommendations to advance the future environmental risk assessment of gene drive applications. The recommendations came from an exercise that identified potential harms from simulated investigational releases of a population suppression gene drive for malaria vector control.
The World Health Organization reported that in 2020, there were 228 million cases of malaria, resulting in 602,000 deaths in the African region. Engineered gene drives are one approach to control malaria, which involves releasing genetically modified mosquitoes of malaria vector species.
Gene drive applications share many biosafety considerations that are applicable to other genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Like other GMOs, they are subject to regulatory oversight and environmental risk assessment (ERA) under biosafety legal frameworks globally. However, unlike other GMOs, gene drives for vector control are more likely to disperse beyond immediate release locations and persist for years in target populations, making the assessment of ecological risks with a broader scope particularly important.
The nine recommendations include the following:
For more details, read the open-access paper in the Malaria Journal.
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