Gene drives are heritable elements that bias inheritance in their favour, resulting in the genetic element becoming more prevalent in the population over successive generations. Among the different ideas, harnessing naturally-occurring gene drives has been considered a promising approach for vector control. Īs part of this effort, scientists have been researching genetic approaches that could provide a complementary tool in the fight against malaria. The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently consulting stakeholders to update its 2016–2030 Global Technical Strategy for malaria with an added focus on the "country ownership and leadership", including community participation, and the need to foster "innovation in tools and implementation approaches". As a result, many high burden countries are losing ground. ![]() Many factors explain this situation, including the change in mosquito biting behaviour and the increased insecticide resistance. With this paper Target Malaria offers an opportunity to explore the practical achievements and challenges of stakeholder engagement during early phases of a technology evaluation, and in particular how it implemented an assessment framework to learn from its experience.Īfter two decades of steady progress in the fight against malaria, the decrease in cases and deaths has been stalling since 2017. Stakeholders’ involvement in this research process is one of the recurring requirements in international guidance documents. Gene drive technology is increasingly considered as a promising approach to control vector borne diseases, in particular malaria. The assessments demonstrated ways to increase understanding and ensure effective progress with field studies and, therefore, the pathway for responsible research. The function of these assessments is crucial for the learning agenda. This paper shows the importance of this first phase of work to innovate and learn about engagement processes for responsible research in the field of genetic approaches for malaria vector control. The latter was implemented to evaluate whether the release activities could proceed with the appropriate level of agreement from the community. This study provides a review of engagement activities relevant to field trials on non-gene drive genetically-modified mosquitoes as well as an assessment framework-using both qualitative and quantitative studies as well as an audit procedure. However, they do not provide a road map on how to proceed or what benchmarks should be used to assess this work. ![]() The existing guidelines on gene drive mosquito provide an overall framework for such engagement work. In addition to the entomological and laboratory work to prepare for this important milestone, significant community and stakeholder engagement work was done. Target Malaria is one of the research projects developing this technology, and in July 2019, the project proceeded to an important step for this evaluation pathway: the small-scale release of non-gene drive sterile male mosquitoes in a village in Burkina Faso. Gene drive mosquitoes are one potential new technology in the control of malaria vectors. Innovative tools are needed to complement the existing approach for malaria elimination.
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