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Singapore collaboration achieves greater than 90% reduction in release areas
Monday, November 4, 2019
Good news
is coming in from our field trial in Singapore. Last fall, we entered into a
partnership
with Singapore’s National Environment Agency (NEA) for the ongoing Project
Wolbachia
- Singapore to help reduce the population of
Aedes aegypti
. Over this past year we have been excited to see increasing suppression in our release areas as the program has grown to cover more residential blocks in the Tampines neighborhood of Singapore. As we close out the third phase of the field study and prepare to expand even further in Phase 4, we are happy to report that Project
Wolbachia
has achieved
more than 90 percent suppression
of the
Aedes aegypti
mosquito population in our release areas. Notably, in some of our release area blocks, we observed no female mosquitoes for multiple weeks at a time in the study traps.
Singapore’s high-rise and high density urban landscape presents a unique challenge to ensuring that the male mosquitoes we release are spread out effectively among different floors. For Phase 3, our collaboration treated 60 residential blocks, home to more than 22,000 residents, in Tampines West. We also deployed 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.
16-story residential block 816 at the Tampines West release site under the Phase 3 and 4 phase study
As with all of our programs to date, we use a
Wolbachia
-based sterile insect technique. The male mosquitoes we release carry the bacterium
Wolbachia
and mate with urban female
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes, that don’t have the bacterium. The resulting eggs from these matings do not hatch. Over time, the continued releases of sterile male mosquitoes, which cannot bite, gradually brings down the population of female
Aedes aegypti
, which can bite and spread diseases such as dengue and Zika. The NEA is exploring whether this mosquito population reduction can lower the risks of dengue transmission, which is a critical health issue in Singapore.
The Debug team will continue to carry out releases in an expanded release site in Tampines West in the next phase of the Project
Wolbachia
field study (Phase 4) in collaboration with the NEA. The expansion will double the release residential blocks to 121 and cover approximately 45,000 residents.
Map of Tampines West study site: green area = Phase 3 , dotted line area = Phase 4. Map provided by
National Environment Agency.
We look forward to learning more about the effectiveness of continued release of sterile male
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes through the expanded study site, as well as improving processes and release strategies in order to test new and innovative approaches to sustain a low
Aedes aegypti
population.
Yanni Yoong, Program Manager and Evdoxia Kakani, PhD, Senior Scientist, Verily
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