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Apodaca: UCI professor fights diseases with study of mosquitoes

A female Anopheles stephensi mosquito feeds on a human host.

A female Anopheles stephensi mosquito feeds on a human host.

(James Gathany / Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via AP)
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There’s a secure facility requiring special key-card access at UC Irvine that few outsiders get to see. It exists not only to keep what’s outside from getting in, but to prevent what’s inside from getting out, and to maintain the contents under very specific conditions.

The mystery inhabitants? Mosquitoes. Thousands and thousands of mosquitoes, housed in screen-topped popcorn buckets — that’s right, the kind of containers used at your local cineplex, which it turns out are ideally suited for this purpose.

Here the winged bloodsuckers zip about in their tubs in a carefully controlled, hot, humid atmosphere evocative of mid-summer in Florida.

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Microbiologist Anthony James calls the place an “insectary,” which is essentially a nursery for insects. Professor James recently escorted me on a visit to this inner sanctum, and I have to confess to a serious case of the heebie-jeebies. I’m not comfortable around most insects, but I harbor a particular distaste for mosquitoes.

“They’re annoying. There’s no question about it,” James said.

But it’s more than that.

Mosquitoes are among the most dangerous creatures on the planet. Through their vampiric eating habits — human blood is a terrific source of protein, James explains —they transmit a smorgasbord of terrible infectious diseases, including malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus and the latest cause for worldwide concern, the Zika virus.

Still, James claims to have a certain affection for the mosquitoes in his facility. As much as I detest them, I understand why he is using his tiny test subjects to develop methods of altering their genes to render them incapable of transmitting disease.

Three decades into this research, James is coming tantalizingly close to real-world applications.

“We’re not going to win the war against all mosquitoes everywhere, but we can make progress on pathogens and the diseases they transmit,” he said.

We’re not going to win the war against all mosquitoes everywhere, but we can make progress on pathogens and the diseases they transmit.

— Anthony James, UC Irvine microbiologist

Born in Michigan and raised in La Mirada, James has the demeanor of an amiable science nerd. He earned both his undergraduate degree and PhD at UCI, later moving to Boston for post-doctoral work, including a stint at Harvard. Jumping at the chance to move back to California, he accepted UCI’s offer to return in 1989, and he has taught and continued his research there ever since.

When he first started looking into whether the emerging field of genetics could provide a solution to the problem of disease transmission by mosquitoes, he had to start from scratch.

After securing grant funding, James had multiple issues to solve. He had to develop tools and methods for hunting down and isolating the right pieces of mosquito DNA, and for manipulating them so they would no longer carry diseases. Then he had to figure out how to insert the disarmed genes back into the mosquitoes. Alternatively, he has engineered ways of building synthetic genes that are also immune to certain diseases.

It’s detailed, painstaking work. The job is complicated by the fact that there are many different types of mosquitoes, with varying capabilities for spreading a range of diseases. There are about 40 different species of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes alone, James said. While the methods he has developed can be reapplied, each mosquito species and disease requires a specific effort to disable genetically.

On the day I visit, James is working in the lab, something he rarely gets to do because so much of his time these days is taken up by paperwork.

“This is the fun stuff,” he said, as he points me to images of a mosquito pupa that are transmitted from a special microscope to a computer screen. It’s a female — I learned that only females ingest blood — with a fluorescent blue patch in her eye that is used as a marker to let James and his fellow researchers know that the modified gene has been properly inserted.

Another piece of the puzzle he’s working on is developing a way to deliver these new genetic blueprints into the general population of mosquitoes in the wild.

Despite these challenges, James said he could be just a few years away from applications that are ready for release into the real world. He is also currently seeking funding to extend his research into working specifically on the Zika problem.

Yet James is also cognizant of another hurdle to overcome: fear among the general public of genetically modified organisms. He offers reassurance that every possible negative scenario that’s been suggested so far can be debunked, but he understands that what he envisions will require discussion and deliberation.

“It’s really hard to say how long that will take,” he said. “It’s public awareness and public judgment.”

He also cautions that genetics alone won’t provide a total solution, in part because nature tends to stay one step ahead.

“There are always new diseases that pop up,” he said, noting that a year ago no one was talking about Zika. Now it’s in the news every day as worries escalate that the virus, which has been linked to the birth defect microcephaly, will proliferate rapidly around the globe.

“It’s part of the human condition moving forward. There’s always going to be something there” to put human health at risk, James said.

Nonetheless, together with eradication, containment programs and other efforts, James’ genetic research could lead to great progress in tamping down on the diseases that mosquitoes transmit. For a mosquito-hater like me, that’s very welcome news.

PATRICE APODACA is a former Newport-Mesa public school parent and former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She lives in Newport Beach.

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