Philanthropist Bill Gates calls for bringing on the genetically modified mosquitoes.

In order to make mosquitoes more resistant to diseases like malaria and dengue, biologists armed with a new gene-editing technology have proposed altering mosquitoes in recent years. The researchers say they can quickly push an alteration through an entire species using a mechanism known as a “gene drive”.

“In less than five years, I think there’s a good chance it will be out there,” Gates said in an interview with Bloomberg News before speaking at a conference of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston.

A mosquito carrying one copy of an altered gene passes it on to 50 percent of its offspring in normal reproduction. A dramatic increase in the rate of spread is made possible through the near 100 percent transfer of altered gene in to the offspring through the insertion of an engineered segment of DNA according to the gene drive program.

“Gene drives, I do think, over the next three to five years will be developed in a form that will be extremely beneficial for knocking down” mosquito populations, Gates said.

“Of course, that makes it a key tool to reduce malaria deaths,” he adds.

Malaria-resistant mosquitoes that passed on the trait to 99.5 percent of their progeny are claimed to have been achieved by scientists in a lab. Even though the technology may work, it’s controversial.

For example, many scientists claim that the results of the targeted species cross-breeding with another organism are not known and this they claim makes gene drive unsafe. There are also chances of the development of spontaneous, unintended mutations in the released mosquitoes. These have made such critics call for more regulations.

“My basic belief is that children dying of malaria is a bad thing, and that we should be able to meet these objections. But there’s still a fair bit of work to be done. Nothing is ready to be deployed today,” Gates said.

Committing almost $2 billion in grants to combat the disease since launching the philanthropy group in 2000, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder has waged a lengthy battle against malaria through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to the World Health Organization, there were about 214 million malaria cases and 438,000 deaths from the disease in 2015.

In the meantime, a mosquito project that doesn’t involve genetic modification has already has been deployed, Gates says. A bacterium called Wolbachia, which can block the transmission of dengue and the Zika virus, is infected into the mosquitoes. The Wolbachia mosquitoes have already been released in countries including Australia and Indonesia and the Gates Foundation started funding work on the Wolbachia mosquitoes 15 years ago. Gates said that in Colombia and Brazil in the next year, there can be a large-scale deployment of Wolbachia mosquitoes.

The ultimate goal was to eradicate malaria, learning from previous efforts to wipe out diseases including smallpox and polio, Gates said.

“The highest return ever in global health was smallpox eradication. Every year, the lack of disease cases and lack of having to think about vaccination has been a mind-blowing return,” he said.

(Adapted from Bloomberg)