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Singapore welcomes the Debug Project!
Monday, September 17, 2018
Today, at the Fifth Singapore International Dengue Workshop (SIDW), the
National Environment Agency
(NEA) announced that we have become a partner in
Project
Wolbachia
– Singapore
, a multi-year research program founded and led by Singapore’s NEA. We’re excited to bring the
Debug Project
’s technology to the Phase 2 field study of Project
Wolbachia
– Singapore, which has already
shown indications
that a
Wolbachia
-based sterile insect technique may be successful in suppressing the
Aedes aegypti
population in Singapore’s urban environment.
Yanni Yoong (left) and Nigel Snoad (right) preparing to sort mosquitoes.
One of the unique challenges of deploying the sterile insect technique in Singapore is effectively distributing sterile, male mosquitoes across the many high-rise apartment complexes that fill its landscape. In Singapore, as in many other dense, urban environments,
Aedes aegypti
breed in clean, stagnant water found in planters, vases and other containers in the hallways and homes within multi-floor buildings. To tackle this challenge, we have designed a new automated release system, contained within a 1.3m x 1m cart, lightweight enough to be pushed by an individual. With this new release device, we can precisely control the distribution of sterile, male mosquitoes within the corridors of the structures. Additionally, Project
Wolbachia
– Singapore will employ our mosquito sex-sorting technology, which has been successfully used in
Debug Fresno
and
Debug Innisfail
to separate male and female mosquitoes using a computer vision algorithm and artificial intelligence. Our team of scientists and automation specialists look forward to collaborating with NEA to drive the science and technology of the sterile insect technique forward.
This is an exciting time for the Debug team as we enter into a new region of the world, which challenges us to consider new ecologies, mosquito behavior, and human environments. With our first field study, Debug Fresno, launching just a year and a half ago, we continue to move forward into new environments, representative of areas where dengue, Zika, and other mosquito-borne diseases commonly spread. We look forward to all we will learn in this new region and to taking another step in realizing Debug’s mission to reduce the devastating impact that disease-carrying mosquitoes inflict on people around the world.
Yanni Yoong, Program Manager, Verily and Nigel Snoad, Product Manager, Verily
Debug Innisfail achieves strong suppression
Friday, July 20, 2018
During this past wet season in Far North Queensland,
Debug Innisfail
, a collaboration between Australia’s
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
(CSIRO),
James Cook University
(JCU) and Verily, released sterile, male
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes with
Wolbachia
into central Innisfail and several nearby communities to research whether we could suppress the population of these dangerous invasive mosquitoes.
We came to Innisfail with CSIRO and JCU to see how
Debug’s approach
to reduce mosquito populations with SIT would work in a tropical environment where these mosquitoes thrive, and to learn what it was like to operate our technology with research collaborators a long way from our home base. For more than six months, our partners at CSIRO and JCU reared millions of
Aedes aegypti
, used our tools to remove the biting females and released more than 3 million males into three neighbourhoods around Innisfail. The CSIRO field team monitored mosquito traps and performed releases three times a week through a drought,
a cyclone
, and flooding in a week that brought nearly 30 inches of rain.
With the Debug Innisfail releases now finished for this season, we’re extremely happy to see the program achieve strong suppression of
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes. The trap and monitoring data show that the occurrence of biting, female
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes decreased by more than 80% in the three release areas relative to similar, untreated sites in the Cassowary Coast. This is a result we’re proud of and it reflects the hard work and collaboration across our partnership.
We are particularly thankful to the people of Mourilyan, South Johnstone, Goondi Bend and the rest of the Cassowary Coast region for their strong support. The community has been incredibly welcoming, hosting surveillance traps in their homes, coming to events, and supporting the team as they conducted releases.
Residents of Mourilyan wave at the Debug Innisfail van. Photo credit: CSIRO.
Beyond the field results, Debug Innisfail represents an important step in the development of Verily’s Debug project: we’ve worked with and supported our partners at CSIRO and JCU as they used our technologies on the other side of the world to make and release mosquitoes. We’ve all learnt a huge amount about how to design and operate a successful Sterile Insect Technique program, and this experience is already being applied to our ongoing work.
Nigel Snoad, Product Manager, Debug
Debug Fresno continues!
Monday, April 30, 2018
Mosquitoes in Fresno take the winter off and wait for spring. Not so for the Debug team. We spent the winter months carefully reviewing the data from our
2017 field study in Fresno
, brainstorming on scientific and operational improvements, and updating our technologies and techniques. We think these updates put us in a great place to make an even bigger impact on the population of invasive
Aedes aegypti
in Fresno - and so on April 16th, Verily, in collaboration with
Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District
and
MosquitoMate
, began our first releases of sterile male
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes of the 2018 season in Fresno County.
Like last year, the primary goal is to see a steep decline in the number of biting female
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes in the areas where we release sterile male mosquitoes, but there are a few differences in the program this year. Last year, we began releasing mosquitoes in mid-July when the mosquito populations in Fresno were already approaching peak density. This year, we began releasing our sterile male mosquitoes in mid-April when mosquito reproduction is just beginning for the season, in order to outnumber and outcompete the wild male mosquito population with the release of fewer sterile male mosquitoes. In addition, we are conducting releases in more neighborhoods in Fresno County to increase the number and variety of environments included in the study.
We are pleased with what we achieved so far in Fresno County and are looking forward to continue towards the goal of reducing the number of biting, female
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes during the 2018 mosquito season.
You can read more about Debug Fresno at
debugfresno.com
Jacob Crawford, Sr. Scientist
Targeting Mosquitoes on their Home Turf: Debug heads to Australia
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
This November, the Debug team at Verily took an exciting next step with the launch of our first international field study,
Debug Innisfail
, as part of the collaboration we
formed
in October 2016 with the Australian
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
(CSIRO) and
James Cook University
(JCU).
For the Debug team at Verily, Innisfail and the greater Cassowary Coast region of Queensland, Australia is an appealing place to undertake our research to reduce the invasive
Aedes aegypti
mosquito. As a tropical climate, Far North Queensland (FNQ) is more representative of the areas where
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes usually thrive. In fact, FNQ not only has an established population of
Aedes aegypti
but also has experienced outbreaks of dengue, and as we noted in our blog post last year, JCU and CSIRO have a great deal of mosquito research experience in this region. Additionally, Debug Innisfail represents an essential next step and challenge for our technology and research design: the ability to support partners at a distance as they use our technologies to help make and release mosquitoes.
For this field study, CSIRO is releasing sterile, male
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes bred with
Wolbachia
into central Innisfail and several nearby communities through the region’s wet season. We will measure our success by monitoring changes in the number of biting, female mosquitoes in these release areas relative to similar neighborhoods nearby that will serve as controls. Though only minutes drive apart, the behavior of
Aedes aegypti
coupled with the separation of townships by fields of sugar-cane and river tributaries makes this a perfect place to see how far we can suppress the population of biting, female
Aedes aegypti
using our technology. This ecological isolation is because
Aedes aegypti
hover around human activity and travel on average
less than 100 meters
in the search for a mate, effectively making each township an ecological island, thus allowing us to measure our impact with more precision.
On Wednesday, November 15, the Debug Innisfail van (aka the “Mobile Mosquito Unit”, see photo) began work in Mourilyan, with CSIRO staff releasing mosquitoes produced at JCU near Cairns. As production ramps up, our partners will continue to expand the study to neighboring communities. Over the next week, releases will hopefully begin in two additional neighborhoods, South Johnston and Goondi Bend. Once Debug Innisfail is running at scale releases will occur in all study sites three times a week for up to 24 weeks.
Members of the research and field operations team, including members of CSIRO and James Cook University, on the first day of releases.
This month’s first releases are the culmination of over a year’s work in scientific and operational preparation. During this time, CSIRO and JCU, as well as researchers from the University of Queensland and the QIMR Berghofer Research Institute, reared
Wolbachia
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes, studied the size and behavior of the
Aedes aegypti
mosquito population in and around Innisfail, and built strong links with the community members and local government, including the Cassowary Coast regional council whose support has been a critical element of our launch. The research our teams have done together over the last 12 months has not only benefited our project design, but has also resulted in our first
peer reviewed publication
which we hope will benefit the field of mosquito research overall.
CSIRO, JCU and ourselves all still have a huge amount to learn: how these non-biting males disperse and survive in the landscape, how well they find females in and around people’s houses, and how to operate our equipment a long way from our home base in California. We’re eager to see the impact these males can make on the biting, female population in these towns and take the next step in testing our technology in the field.
Nigel Snoad, Product Manager
Rhodamine B: A New Tool for Monitoring Mosquito Mating
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
We are very excited to announce the Debug Project’s first
publication
, which explores tracking mosquito movement and mating in the wild, a collaborative effort between Verily’s Debug team, The Australian
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization
(CSIRO) and
James Cook University
(JCU) in Australia. The study demonstrated that rhodamine B can be utilized to successfully perform mark-release-recapture (MRR) experiments and observe mating in the field.
Rhodamine B is a red dye that fluoresces when exposed to certain wavelengths of light. When fed to mosquitoes, it binds to internal proteins and stains them bright red. Rhodamine B staining is observable in adult mosquitoes by eye or by a microscope when looking at small tissues, which can be useful when studying mosquitoes in the wild. Mosquitoes can be tracked in the wild using an approach known as mark-release-recapture (MRR) where insects are marked (in our research, with rhodamine B), released into the wild, and then recaptured for marking examination. MRRs provide information on how far mosquitoes move across the landscape, as well as their lifespan, and can help us estimate the wild population size by comparing the ratio of marked recaptured individuals to unmarked insects.
A male Aedes aegypti mosquito fed on a mixture of rhodamine B and honey is stained visibly red (A) compared to males fed on honey alone
(B).
Traditional methods for MRR labeling rely on dusting mosquitoes with fluorescent powders, however, these powders can be difficult to detect and can impair a mosquito's ability to fly. Rhodamine B, on the other hand, can be easily visualized and evidence suggests it does not impact a mosquito’s activity or health.
Rhodamine B labeled males will seek out wild females. During mating males transfer their labelled semen to females, which can be detected by its red fluorescent properties.
Rhodamine B has another useful property: it can stain the male mosquito’s semen, which females store in dedicated capsules called spermathecae. After mating with a rhodamine B fed male, stained semen can be observed in the female’s spermatheca using a microscope. So not only can rhodamine B be used to track males in the wild, it can also be used to measure how successfully they mate with wild females.
Rhodamine B labeled sperm within the female spermathcal capsules after mating.
In our paper, we demonstrate that rhodamine B is a very effective label when mixed into the honey normally fed to male mosquitoes, with the stain visible up to three days after males are released. We performed several small scale MRR experiments in Cairns, Australia and were able to successfully detect mating between our lab reared males and wild females through rhodamine B fluorescence.
For future sterile male releases rhodamine B labeling will be a useful tool allowing us to easily and efficiently assess the dispersal, fitness and mating ability of the males we rear in our Debug factory. We are excited to continue this research and further demonstrate rhodamine B’s utility.
Sara Mitchell, Senior Scientist
Wrapping up Debug Fresno 2017
Monday, November 6, 2017
As we begin to wind down
Debug Fresno
operations for 2017, our team has been reflecting on the work of many individuals and groups that brought this study from concept to now near completion. From the development of unique technologies that scale the sterile insect technique, to testing our operations in a real-world environment and quickly adjusting to challenges, our team has achieved strong results from this season’s field study that we are proud to share today.
One of our primary goals at the outset of this study was to see a steep decline in the presence of female
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes in the area where sterile male mosquitoes were released relative to similar control neighborhoods in Fresno County. Through the analysis of our trap and monitoring data, we found during the peak of the mosquito season there was an average 68% reduction in biting, female
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes in our release area relative to other similar sites. These are promising results for our first field study, and we are looking forward to expanding to additional sites over more than one season to see what can be achieved.
For the Debug team at Verily, we also wanted to pressure test the first iteration of our technologies in a real-world environment and gather insights that could help us refine our approach. We gained valuable experience in all areas of the project. From larval production, to sorting male and female mosquitoes, to releasing sterile male mosquitoes, to trapping and monitoring, we continually improved our efficiency throughout the season. This experience is already being applied to future studies including Debug Innisfail, which will begin later this month in Australia.
As the mosquito season in Fresno County draws to a close, we want to thank the many people involved in this study, including our collaborators at
Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District
and
MosquitoMate
as well as the residents of Fresno County that have engaged with us in the Debug Fresno study. As our technology and research program continues to grow and improve, we hope to continue to partner with communities to learn how to reduce the threat of mosquito-borne diseases around the globe.
This post is also available on Verily's
blog
.
Jacob Crawford, Scientist and Yi Han, Product Manager
Debug Fresno, our first U.S. field study
Friday, July 14, 2017
Last October, we announced the
Debug Project
, an initiative at Verily to reduce the devastating global health impact that disease-carrying mosquitoes inflict on people around the world. Today, I’m happy to announce the launch of
Debug Fresno
, our first field study in the U.S. to test a potential mosquito control method using sterile insect technique in collaboration with
MosquitoMate
and Fresno County’s
Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District
(CMAD).
Debug Fresno will target the invasive
Aedes aegypti
mosquito, which can transmit diseases like Zika, dengue, and chikungunya.
Aedes aegypti
first appeared in the central valley of California in 2013, and since then has become pervasive in Fresno County. This study will be the largest U.S. release to-date of sterile male mosquitoes treated with
Wolbachia
, a naturally occurring bacterium, and will take place over a 20 week period in two neighborhoods each approximately 300 acres in size. When these sterile males mate with wild females the resulting eggs will not hatch. To measure our outcomes, we will compare the adult population density and egg hatching of
Aedes aegypti
in these targeted areas to two control neighborhoods. Over time, we hope to see a steep decline in the presence of
Aedes aegypti
in these communities.
In 2016, CMAD and MosquitoMate piloted the first-ever U.S. release of male
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes with
Wolbachia
in Fresno County. Our 2017 collaboration represents a more than 25x increase in the release efforts, with a total of one million non-biting sterile male mosquitoes released weekly, made possible by the automated mass rearing and sex-sorting processes developed at Verily. Additionally, our software algorithms and on-the-ground release devices will allow us to distribute the sterile male mosquitoes in an even and targeted way throughout Fresno’s mosquito season. We believe that these advancements could have a meaningful impact on what is traditionally a very labor-intensive process and could reduce the number of biting
Aedes aegypti
in Fresno County.
Our "Mobile Mosquito Unit", the Debug Fresno van
For the Debug team at Verily, moving our work from the laboratory to the field is not only an important milestone for our group of biologists, engineers, and automation experts, but it’s also a critical step in bringing our long-term vision to reality. Field studies allow us to test our discoveries and technologies in challenging, real-world conditions and collect the necessary evidence to bring them to a broader scale. We hope to demonstrate success with Debug Fresno that will benefit the local communities working with us on this study and later other communities globally where Zika, dengue, and chikungunya are endemic. We are excited to take the first step in that journey today by bringing these technologies to the field.
Jacob Crawford, Scientist
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