Though tests with the human form of malaria is yet to be done, scientists are touting it as a step that might one day help block the spread of an illness that has claimed millions of lives around the world. An estimated 2.7 million people die of malaria each year. In India, there are 1 million cases each year though the number of deaths have fallen considerably.

Several laboratories have been trying to develop resistant mosquitoes. Oxitec, a spin-off company of Oxford University, has decided to collaborate with Chennai-based International Institute for Biotechnology and Toxicology (IIBAT).

S S Vasan, Oxitec’s head of public health, said: “We are collaborating with the IIBAT to test our dengue and chikungunya-control technology involving local experts. The main objective is to test the fitness of our Aedes mosquitoes against the wild type in a small room under total containment.”

IIBAT’s director P Balakrishna Murthy said: “Our proposal has been cleared by the Institutional Biological Safety Committee that has nominees from the DBT, and is now being deliberated by RCGM. It is our hope that it will be approved.”

In population replacement, a mosquito is genetically altered to become resistant to a given disease, say malaria. If somehow this GM mosquito replaces the mosquito in the wild, then you will still have mosquitoes — mosquitoes which bite — but are unable to transmit malaria. So far, the problem was that GM mosquitoes are generally not as fit as those in the wild, so they won’t be able to spread and replace the wild type. The Johns Hopkins scientists seem to have got around that problem for mice under certain conditions.