In his quest to stop a deadly and horrific disease, Oregon Health & Science University’s Brandon Wilder is harnessing the power of 1,400 mosquitoes.

The little bugs live in specialized containers on the university’s Beaverton campus, where the assistant professor and his colleagues’ job, among others, is to keep the bugs “warm and happy.”

That means keeping the temperature at a comfortable 82.4 degrees, humidity at 80% and replenishing cotton pads soaked with sugar-water for the mosquitoes to feed on.

“It’s really a labor of love,” Wilder said of the work at the university’s insectary, which opened in September and is designed to keep as many as 200,000 mosquitoes. Wilder said he has many more mosquito eggs, larva and pupae that are on their way to becoming mosquitoes.

The point of the insectary is to help Wilder try to stop malaria, a disease that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC says killed about 445,000 people worldwide in 2016, 90% of them in Africa.

People infected with malaria can get intense fevers, chills, sweats, nausea, vomiting and “general malaise.” In severe cases, patients can have seizures or acute kidney injury. Infected blood cells can make the brain swell and cause seizures or a coma.

“Severe malaria is a medical emergency and should be treated urgently and aggressively,” the CDC warns.

Mosquitoes pick malaria up from infected people and then transfer the parasite to the next people they sink their proboscises into. Malaria is a tougher type of disease to solve than a virus-based one like measles, for example, and there’s no vaccine for it – yet.

Wilder wants to stop malaria’s severe toll with a vaccine, and he currently has four experiments running to help him accomplish just that. Core among his goals is finding a shot, like for the measles or rubella, that could train people’s immune systems to fight the disease off before it can infect them.

“The only way to get to zero is with a vaccine,” he said. “That’s our goal. That’s all we really care about.”

The first step to creating a vaccine is figuring out how malaria works. But the disease is notoriously hard to study, Wilder said, because it’s neither a virus nor a type of bacteria – both organisms that can be studied in petri dishes, in controlled lab conditions.

Instead, malaria is a protist, an organism that in some cases dramatically changes form depending on its life cycle. And those cycles depend on which organism it’s in – mosquito or mammal – and where inside that organism it is – liver or the blood.

That’s why the insectary is such a big deal. With primates, rodents and mosquitoes on hand, Wilder and his colleagues will have everything they need to track what malaria does at every single stage in its life. They’ll have the chance to look inside a mosquito, inside an infected mammal’s liver and in an infected animal when the disease explodes into the blood and makes the mammal visibly sick.

Wilder is focused on the liver stage.

In some patients, malaria gets to the stage where it hangs out in the liver and then does nothing for a long time before it erupts into the blood and starts causing symptoms. In other cases, malaria will erupt into the blood much faster.

Wilder wants to know what the parasite needs to be able to erupt from the liver. If he can figure that out, then he could perhaps figure out how to keep malaria from getting to the blood stage. An infected person can’t spread the disease while the parasite is just in the liver, Wilder said, so such a treatment could both protect the patient and prevent new infections.

“It can’t go to the next person, so you stop transmission, eliminating the parasite from spreading,” Wilder said.

Back before OHSU had an insectary, this kind of work was much more time-consuming, Wilder said. Someone had to hand-deliver mosquitoes to OHSU. Each mosquito batch offered one shot at an experiment because they had to be destroyed afterward.

Wilder isn’t the only person trying to prevent malaria. In fact, there’s already human-level experiments in the works. If someone develops a successful vaccine before he does, Wilder said he would have plenty of other work to do, such as looking at how malaria interacts with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Little research has been done to see how diseases affect each other and how symptoms differ, Wilder said.

But he also has another idea if someone else makes a malaria vaccine.

“First,” he said, “we would probably all celebrate.”

-- Fedor Zarkhin

fzarkhin@oregonian.com

desk: 503-294-7674|cell: 971-373-2905|@fedorzarkhin

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