Fighting malaria with gene drives: an interview with Dr. Michael Santos

Malaria is one of humanity’s biggest foes, killing an average of 600,000 people per year (mostly African children). That’s more than one death every single minute. Although over the past 25 years this annual death toll has decreased from nearly 900,000, recently progress has stalled.

Data source: World Malaria Report 2024

I’ve previously written about gene drives and their potential to fight malaria by eliminating the mosquitoes that spread it. In 2023, I also wrote about some of the technical and political considerations about gene drives, and concluded that political and regulatory issues, rather than technical problems, were the main roadblocks.

This year, in observance of World Malaria Day, I talked with Dr. Michael Santos, the director of GeneConvene Global Collaborative, an organization working to provide technical and regulatory advice to implement genetic biocontrol strategies for diseases such as malaria.

We discussed the overall concept of gene drives, their potential use against malaria, and challenges that need to be addressed before deployment. Overall, Dr. Santos thinks that the first trials involving release of gene drive mosquitoes into the wild are still 3 to 4 years away, with key obstacles including managing resistance in diverse populations of mosquites, and obtaining approval from regulatory bodies.

If researchers or policy workers want to get involved, Dr. Santos recommended checking out the resources on the GeneConvene website, and also reaching out to the Outreach Network for Gene Drive Research, an organization which connects scientists and regulators to help inform gene drive policy.

Below is a (lightly edited) transcript of our conversation:

Metacelsus:

It's great to meet you, Dr. Santos.

Michael Santos:

Great meeting you as well, and please feel free to call me Mike.

Metacelsus:

I've been interested in gene drives for quite a while. I think I found out about them around 10 years ago. Just for their potential in malaria suppression and improving global health. I've been doing a bit of writing about them over the years on my blog, and it's great that you could talk to me today.

World Malaria Day is coming up, and we should try to focus on methods that are able to prevent this terrible disease. Because right now, it's one of the biggest killers of people around the world.

Can you, for readers or listeners who aren't familiar with the topic area, explain a bit more about how gene drives work, and how they show promise in preventing malaria?

Michael Santos:

Yeah, absolutely. Setting the World Malaria Day context is great because right now, we're still in a situation where a child dies every minute due to malaria, and progress in reducing malaria deaths, which has been impressive from 1990 through several years ago, has plateaued recently. WHO and others have highlighted the need for new ways of attempting to control and ultimately eliminate and hopefully eradicate malaria.

That's the context for why people are exploring these genetic biocontrol approaches, one of which is gene drive. Gene drive is a process where a gene or a genetic element increases its prevalence in a population of organisms over time, more so than you would expect, based on its fitness effects.

This is a natural phenomenon. In fact, it's almost the 100 year anniversary of the first observation.

Metacelsus:

You mean like, drosophila P elements and things like that,¹ or other natural gene drives?

Michael Santos:

I mean in Drosophila obscura. I think in 1928 was the very first observation of sex bias that I don't know exactly how well was understood at the time, but that was the first observation of what would later be understood as selfish, genetic elements. The P element would later be identified. Transposable elements identified by Barbara McClintock in maize, and in others.

The beginnings of the understanding of this natural genetic phenomenon are quite old and go back quite some ways. This observation that it's possible for genes or genetic elements to have this property has been understood for a long time, and it's observed in many different organisms and through many different mechanisms.

Metacelsus:

Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of diversity in the ways that this can happen.

Michael Santos:

If anyone is interested in going deeper, we have some explainers on our Youtube channel and some more information at the GeneConvene Virtual Institute that summarizes some of the different categorical mechanisms of gene drive. But this observation that you can have these genetic elements that become more prevalent in a population over generations.

Since about 1960, people have suggested that maybe this could be harnessed, either natural or engineered analogs, for the control of vectors that transmit diseases. So this is also quite an old idea.

But in the decades since then there's been a lot of progress, and particularly recently, but a lot of progress over that time. And you know first transgenesis to begin with, and then ultimately, these genetic engineering tools, like CRISPR-cas9, that a lot of people are familiar with, but others that preceded it, that have made it easier to engineer this gene drive phenomenon into organisms like the mosquitoes that transmit malaria.

Metacelsus:

CRISPR, in particular, was a big advance because you can more precisely target genes that you want to have as part of your gene drive. I think the more recent gene drives in the literature have nearly all used these CRISPR systems that can precisely target the site that they're going to copy the gene drive into.²

Michael Santos:

If we look at where things have progressed to now, this idea that you could get these genes to increase in prevalence over time. People identified a couple of different mechanisms through which you could limit the spread of a disease like malaria. That's in the case of malaria transmitted just through this vector.

So one is reducing the numbers of the vectors and the other is making a modification in the vector such that the pathogen can't be transmitted. In the case of malaria mosquitoes, there have been investigations both into sex distortion, making the offspring all or almost entirely male, that would eventually lead to a nearly all male population and thus a dramatic reduction of the population, or reducing fertility or something in that pathway that would just directly reduce the number of mosquitoes.

Then the other approach, the malaria parasite has a particularly complicated life cycle and goes through several life cycle stages inside the mosquitoes. And engineering the mosquitoes with elements that are expressed in the mosquito after it takes a blood meal that interferes with the parasite's life cycle is another way of potentially preventing the spread of malaria.

Both those approaches right now have been engineered into malaria vector mosquitoes and those approaches have been demonstrated in laboratory studies. They've demonstrated both the drive that it increases in prevalence over generations, as well as whichever effect they were trying to introduce, either a suppression of female fertility or an inhibition of the ability of the parasite to complete its life cycle inside the mosquito, and that has been achieved with CRISPR-cas9 based homing drives, although in earlier stage work. People have demonstrated a number of different kinds of mechanisms are possible to be implemented leveraging these tools that we have now.

Metacelsus:

In terms of your background and what you've been involved in this area, can you tell me more about how you got started in this? And also, what you're working on now with GeneConvene?

Michael Santos:

I started working in this area in about 2015, when I was at the Gates Foundation in the health program there. The team that I was on was one of the funders of this research. I got involved on the research funder side of it originally, and then in 2019, I moved from the Gates Foundation to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, where I am now, which is a nonprofit organization that was created by law in the US to support the mission of the NIH, and manages many different scientific partnerships, and has actually been involved in this particular area for 20 years, going back to the big injection of funding that occurred with the grand challenges in global health program in around 2004, 2005.

Since 2019, I've been at FNIH, part of this program called the GeneConvene Global collaborative, which I lead now. GeneConvene itself is an initiative, a program within FNIH that supports informed decision making about genetic biocontrol approaches for public health.

One of the main areas of focus for us are these gene drive approaches, specifically for malaria and sub-Saharan Africa. We support that mission in a few different ways. One is primarily convening people to identify and address key questions. Although there are elements of gene drive applied to malaria that have precedent, obviously there's genetic modification of organisms, there is classical biocontrol approaches, there are other malaria control approaches.

Metacelsus:

You mean like sterile insects?

Michael Santos:

Yeah, sterile insects as an example of genetic biocontrol achieved through radiation impact on the genetics. But classical biocontrol. For example, the introduction of a natural predator from the home range of what's now an invasive species. Then obviously conventional vector control, like insecticide-based vector control. Genetic biocontrol of malaria vectors draws from all of these different areas. So there are opportunities to bring people together and identify the specific questions for gene drive approaches, and help inform them. We also do provide technical advice and technical services, especially around regulatory science, which we'll talk about a little bit more later. And then also a key focus for us is on strengthening capacity and sharing information. A big goal for us is to help all stakeholders that are interested have a greater awareness, have a deeper understanding, provide resources. At a wide range of scales, from helping people understand the basics through helping people understand the technical depths. That's what we do and what I'm delighted to be part of.

Metacelsus:

Sounds like you're doing some good work there. As you're partnering with other organizations, are there any promising organizations that are working in this area? I'm aware of Target Malaria, which is doing a lot of things, and I believe Burkina Faso. Do you know of any other gene drive research that's going on either in academia or in nonprofit organizations that you think should be highlighted?

Michael Santos:

There are a lot of different partners that work in this space in many different ways. One of the really important ones to highlight is the African Union and the African Union Development Agency-NEPAD. The African Union convened a high-level panel on emerging technologies to evaluate different technologies for their potential to contribute to development goals within Africa. One of the areas they identified and prioritized was supporting African countries to develop their capacity around research and evaluation of gene drive approaches for malaria. The African Union Development Agency then supports different African countries and regional groups in order to build their capacity for that. They're a really important partner for us around the capacity strengthening activities I talked about.

There's also the African Genetic Biocontrol Consortium, which we provide support to, which helps convene people who are parts of different organizations from these different stakeholder groups of vector control, from one health or from biosafety within Africa. Organizations like WHO play an important role in providing their perspective on new tools.

I know you wanted to know on the science side too, so in terms of the groups that are most advanced in developing these technologies specifically for malaria there is Target Malaria, as you mentioned, which is a a multinational research collaboration which so far has been primarily pursuing this female fertility reduction approach. There are two other research consortia that are pursuing these population modification approaches of trying to stop the parasite from being transmitted by the mosquito. One called the University of California Malaria Initiative, and another called Transmission Zero. Within malaria mosquitoes, those are the most advanced programs. For controlling invasive rodents, there's a collaboration called GBIRd, which focuses on, so far, developing gene drive for mice, but with an interest long run in other invasive rodents. Those are the research collaborations that have gone farthest. But in academia, nonprofit research institutions globally, there's work in lots of different organisms for lots of different applications, for golden mussels, for New World screwworm. People have looked in ticks. People have looked in other disease vector mosquitoes besides the anopheles that transmit malaria. This kind of work at an academic earlier stage level is happening in lots of different areas.

Metacelsus:

It's about 10 years since the first CRISPR-based gene drives were actually published. In those 10 years there's been millions of deaths of malaria, especially in Africa. Why do you think there hasn't been deployment yet of gene drives to combat mosquito vectors of malaria?

Michael Santos:

The process of getting to the implementation of gene drives as a malaria control tool has lots of different steps to it. To ensure that everyone knows that the current stage is that these approaches have been studied in cages in bio secure facilities. But not in the environment yet. There has not yet been an application put into a regulatory authority to conduct a field trial for gene drive. Yet. It is anticipated that some of these groups that are most advanced in their research, like I was talking about, are likely to do that within the next 2 or 3 years. It's a question then of whether regulatory authorities will approve those field trials, and whether they'll be funded.

Metacelsus:

Which regulatory authorities will these be? You mentioned, the African Union. Will it be the actual governments of those countries?

Michael Santos:

The way genetically modified organisms are regulated is not uniform throughout the world. However, most countries in the world are signatories to a treaty called the Cartagena Protocol for Biosafety that's under the UN Convention on biological diversity. In those countries there is an authority that is specifically responsible for assessing biosafety, and the scope of those authorities includes genetically modified organisms generally. It's the case that these mosquitoes that are genetically engineered with gene drives would fall under their jurisdiction. An organization that is interested in doing a field trial would go through the process that's described in their country in those regulations in order to put in an application, and then receive a decision potentially with conditions about what's required to do as part of that study, and potentially move forward if they're approved.

Metacelsus:

Gene drives in theory would spread beyond any country, especially if they're in an area with a lot of mosquitoes. How is that going to be handled in terms of the applications?

Michael Santos:

That's a key topic of discussion. One of the reasons that it's really valuable that the African Union Development agency is involved in the case of the primary vectors of malaria in Africa. Those vectors exist in many different countries in Africa, although generally not outside of Africa. For example, there's been a lot of work in the West Africa region through this organization called ECOWAS, which is the French acronym for the West Africa region. In these countries, there have been representatives from the different ministries and authorities have been convening together to develop kind of regional perspectives on best practices, which they published in a series of guidelines that are publicly available through AUDA-NEPAD. Although these are country-level decisions, there's a strong emphasis on bringing together countries at the regional level and to the continental level under the AU, so that there's an opportunity for transparency and collaboration. In some cases, for example in West Africa, there's actually a mechanism for making regional biosafety decisions, so other regions are looking at that too.

Metacelsus:

In terms of the biggest regulatory or political challenges that's holding back the use of this technology, what would you say the main issues are that need to be addressed?

Michael Santos:

Right now, none of the research development groups have even progressed to the point of applying yet. If we look at the factors behind that, that's because, you mentioned the first demonstrations were about 10 years ago, but people, when thinking about malaria control, look at this through a lens of what they call a target product profile or preferred product characteristics. And looking at the performance that you would want to see in order to be confident that as an intervention against malaria it could be successful, so there has been a fair amount of work, actually quite a lot of work since those initial demonstrations in trying to improve the performance of the gene drives.

For example, in the case of a fertility reducing mechanism, there's really strong selection pressure for functionally resistant alleles. So, eventually exploring different mechanisms to try to minimize the formation of resistance in the population has been a key frontier for additional work over those 10 years. So, part of it is getting to the point where researchers feel confident that they actually have a construct that is suitable for use. But to do a field trial, you need to then do some baseline characterization work of your field trial site. There's, of course, community engagement work with the communities that's part of that and preparing for that. Then, in order to put in an application to an authority that's going to assess the biosafety risk, there's a number of experiments and studies they're looking to have done and see as part of that application, so that they can evaluate it and make their decision. Similar to if you were approaching a clinical trial for a new medicine, the way that you would put together a package of information to present to the regulator.

Metacelsus:

What types of experiments would those be? Large cage studies?

Michael Santos:

So many different domains, but thinking through the different categories of risk. Human or animal risks are things like allergenicity and toxicity, basic kinds of studies, whether the transgenes result in the production, in some cases they deliberately result in the production of new proteins. Whether you see any allergenicity or toxicity effects with a mosquito bite or ingestion of the mosquito. There are questions like stability of the construct. So, what can you demonstrate in there. As you say, you might do it through case studies of following the construct through multiple generations and being able to show its stability, at least over the period of time that you can study. But there are many different things to think about, and people have done work on the different potential pathways to harm. So, the sort of science of risk assessment is to talk about what the protection goals are, what the potential harms are, what the pathways to those harms are, and then ask whether there are experiments or studies you can do in order to inform your understanding of the probability or the magnitude. That's the kind of work that goes into these dossiers, as well as characterizing what the research study you would do would be, like actually designing the field trial.

Metacelsus:

In terms of the technical barriers to achieving that level of data, what do you think are the most pressing technical issues currently with gene drives? Is it resistance? Is it actually being able to spread efficiently? Is it scaling up the production of mosquitoes? Because if these mosquitoes have low fitness, it might be hard to actually produce enough of them. What do you think is the main roadblock in terms of the technical capabilities?

Michael Santos:

I think a lot of the development focus again, like a lot of the reason why time has elapsed between the first demonstration and now is improving performance on the efficacy side. Especially managing resistance to the gene drive in the case of population suppression, but also looking at the performance for population modification approaches of preventing the transmission blocking effect. For example, not just how it performs against a laboratory strain of the malaria parasite, but how it performs against the wider diversity, genetic diversity of parasites that are encountered in the field. That's some research that's happening right now. So, understanding and being confident of the efficacy has been a key driver of scientific development. There are questions about the performance in the field that it's unknown whether there will be technical barriers or not until those experiments are done, and as you say, there are certainly important questions downstream around implementation. but those aren't necessarily gating for people getting to the point of conducting the first field trials and looking at the performance in the field, which will be, if field trials move forward, a dramatic step up in the understanding of the performance of these approaches.

Metacelsus:

What is GeneConvene working on in this space in terms of addressing these issues either on a technical or political level?

Michael Santos:

We work both on the side with the developers of helping to inform their decisions how they're moving forward, and on the governance side. On the developer side, we've been working quite closely with the 3 groups I mentioned that are working in malaria on the way that the first field trials will be designed. There are properties of gene drive that are intended to persist and spread that create complexities for designing a trial where you're attempting to measure the impact of the intervention. That's been technical work. There's been great collaboration among the modelers that are working within each of those groups as they're developing their modeling and their statistical analysis plans. That's one of the kinds of areas. Another kind of area is thinking about what kind of monitoring and surveillance will happen as part of the trials and after the trials. We held a workshop last year, and we have a report from that that will be coming out soon looking at specifically environmental monitoring. There are environmental risk questions.

Metacelsus:

Monitoring the spread of the gene drive, or monitoring the effects on other species?

Michael Santos:

Both are important. But monitoring the malaria vector mosquitoes, at least there's maybe a little bit more experience, because there's a lot of other malaria vector studies and vector control intervention studies that do that. But then, looking at the effect on what people call non-target organisms, organisms that you're not trying to affect with the vector control intervention because there are questions that people ask like: if you suppress the population of these malaria vector mosquitoes, does it have any impacts in the ecosystem, any impact on biodiversity, any impact on the ecosystem services? That you would want to see, so we just launched a webinar series earlier today on, specifically, this topic of environmental monitoring where researchers that work on different aspects of this will be talking about some of the different approaches. We have a couple talks coming up on environmental DNA called eDNA. So, this is on the technical side. On the governance side, we work a lot in regulatory science and working through the mechanisms of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to provide new guidance on how to do environmental risk assessment for engineered gene drive mosquitoes that was endorsed late last year at the Conference of the Parties, and then working with partners, like the African Union Development Agency, on training for regulators and for other stakeholders to familiarize them with these technologies, to answer their questions and to help strengthen their capacity to perform rigorous risk assessments if, in the future, these applications come to them.

Metacelsus:

I'm curious. There are potentially impacts of gene drives that could hypothetically be negative, like affecting other species or, you mentioned, causing some sort of allergic reaction. If you had to pick one thing that is most on your list of things you're worried about, in terms of gene drive effects or any reason that they might not be a good idea to use, what is your biggest concern in this space that you want to watch out for?

Michael Santos:

I think the biggest concern probably is that they just don't work very well in the field, because if they don't deliver benefit for malaria, then there's no risk benefit calculation at all. Like if the gene drives simply do not work. In terms of if they end up being efficacious at suppressing the transmission of malaria, but at the same time risks to other important areas are identified, then that's exactly why countries have governance processes that can weigh the different areas of value, and collect stakeholder perspectives on this and come to some opinion about how they're going to balance these different needs. That's a really important part of having these governance systems in place because that's a judgment that countries, regions and continents need to make for themselves through their mechanisms. What we want as much as possible is for people to be able to make those decisions in an informed way, both to have good information to make that decision with, and to have the capability to evaluate that information and have an informed way of weighing potential benefits and potential risks.

Metacelsus:

When you look at the impact of malaria, especially in Africa, both on number of lives lost, but also on lost economic growth, it's pretty large. I would think that it would be in the interest of many of these governments to deploy this technology. Which do you think will be the first country to allow a gene drive trial if you had to guess?

Michael Santos:

First to say on the first point, I think the importance of the challenge of malaria and the potential of this technology is why the African Union picked it out as an emerging technology for specific capacity building focus. In terms of where, the countries where the research is most advanced include Burkina Faso, Sao Tome and Principe, Uganda, and Tanzania. Those countries are probably the most likely countries within which applications could go in to conduct field trials. Doesn't mean for sure that one of those countries would be the first place that it would happen.

Metacelsus:

Sao Tome and Principe are specifically islands, right? So at least in theory, if you did something like this on an island, you might not have spread to the mainland, or is that likely to happen regardless?

Michael Santos:

People don't know for sure. This is something people study. They look at the population genetics of the mosquitoes on the islands and on the nearest mainland and the mainland locations that are connected by transit and try to understand the rate of gene flow. I think those populations are relatively well isolated. Having said that, gene drive is different than regular gene flow, because you have the ability of the gene to increase in prevalence from a very low initial percentage, even if the mosquito that makes that journey is not particularly fit in the local background. There's uncertainty about this. The oceans do create a geographic barrier, but the sort of height and strength of that geographic barrier in this specific use case isn't known for sure.

Metacelsus:

There are a few designs for drives, I believe they're called daisy drives, that will only copy themselves for a certain number of generations. It does add complexity to the system, so it's more complicated to design and implement, but would that be something to evaluate if you wanted to do a more limited initial trial?

Michael Santos:

As you say, there's a range of mechanisms that can impose some control, spatial or temporal, through either mechanisms where the drive would decay over time or mechanisms where there's a threshold to the drive occurring or not. These approaches definitely are being studied. I mentioned there's a lot of research that's happening in this space, and there are people who are working to implement some of these different kinds of methods. For example, some of the different gene drive mechanisms themselves have intrinsic higher thresholding effects than homing drives which have nominally no threshold to their growth. People are working on those. It may be the case that when we get to the point of countries making regulatory decisions, maybe countries will not want to move forward with self-sustaining low-threshold gene drives initially. Maybe they will decide that they would prefer to have more intermediate steps.

The different research programs are approaching this differently, so the Target Malaria program has already done a field study of genetically sterile mosquitoes in Burkina Faso. So that proposal was put in. The regulatory authority approved it. They moved forward. They've put in a proposal to do another study of a construct that is self-limiting, that's not a gene drive. It will decay out of the population over time, but is not genetically sterile, so the construct will persist for some number of generations. So these are sort of stepping stones toward a self-sustaining gene drive. Transmission Zero in Tanzania is planning to evaluate a split drive, which is similar to the simplest iteration of a daisy drive, where you separate the drive mechanism from the effector mechanism so that it will get temporarily boosted and then decay away. They're also planning to proceed with this kind of stepwise approach. So, there are different ways to approach this, depending on what researchers propose and what regulatory authorities approve.

Metacelsus:

You mentioned that it'll take about 2 or 3 years for these organizations to even be at the point where they're applying to do the gene drive field trials. How long do you think it will be before we see the first gene drive field trial?

Michael Santos:

It's tough to say because I don't know what decisions regulatory authorities will make. If the first applications go in in a couple of years and the first applications are approved, then maybe gene drive trials are beginning in four-ish years or something like that. Of course, the alternative is applications don't go in on that timeline, or the first applications are not approved, in which case the timelines could be longer. We sort of know around the minimum time, but the distribution extends beyond that in a way that we can't really constrain.

Metacelsus:

Presumably, these trials would also involve monitoring, which would go on for a period of time afterwards. How how often would gene drives need to be re-released after the first trial? I guess it would depend on resistance and things like that, but is this likely to be a one-and-done type of situation, or will we need to periodically update drives as resistance evolves to some of the initial versions?

Michael Santos:

That the kind of question that field trials will be really important to inform, because we don't know. It's assumed that for almost anything, at some point resistance will become important. The timescale on which that happens has a pretty wide range of plausible values. If you look at computer models of the introduction of gene drives that have properties similar to what are observed in the laboratory cages, and that assume that those similar properties will occur in the field, then they could sustain for a long time, but we don't know for sure that the performance will be the same. In the timeline, there's some sort of stochasticity to the mechanisms that are associated with resistance arising. It may also be different in different locations. In many places, mosquito populations are highly seasonal in their abundance, so there could be, certainly, when people study this with modeling, there are certain properties that make it more or less likely that the gene drives disappear from local populations and the local areas then recolonized by wild type mosquitoes without the gene drive. So, in those cases you would, in principle, need to re-release. But how common that actually happens, in practice, will only be understood once there are field trials.

Metacelsus:

Has there ever been any research into gene drives in the malaria parasite? I know that has both asexual and sexual reproduction stages, or other, beyond mosquitoes, other approaches.

Michael Santos:

I am not aware of anybody looking at it specifically in the parasite. People have looked at gene drive-like mechanisms in viruses, so in pathogens is the case. I'm not aware of any work specifically in the malaria parasite. There are many different applications that people are looking at for gene drive, besides mosquito-borne diseases. Of course, other vector-borne diseases. The control of agricultural pests. For example, the New World screwworm is controlled in North America with sterile insect technology. In South America, researchers in Uruguay, have proposed the possibility of gene drive approaches for controlling it, and, in conservation, like I mentioned, in the application of removal of invasive rodents from islands. That's probably the area that there has been the most attention. But people have speculated about other conservation applications, like squirrels in in the UK and others, where the research is much farther away from being able to implement it.

Metacelsus:

Before we end, is there anything else you'd like people to know about GeneConvene or about gene drives in general?

Michael Santos:

We're really committed to raising awareness and understanding of these approaches. I mentioned this before, but just to reiterate, at the GeneConvene Virtual Institute, we provide a lot of information. There's a very large, frequently asked questions section that goes through many of the different questions that people ask about this, including many of the different kinds of risks that people are interested in. We have a YouTube channel where you can see how someone makes a transgenic mosquito, explanations of different kinds of gene drives, or the basics.

On the website, we have a piece on the history if people want to see the kind of seminal papers on the history of the thinking about this approach. I definitely encourage anyone who's interested in learning any more about this to check this out. We have a newsletter, which you can subscribe to, a webinar series, and lots of different resources. And if people want to learn more and can't find a resource, please let us know. In that same vein, I want to thank you. We really appreciate people who are committed to communicating and helping more people learn about and understand this. I really appreciate the work that you're doing and the opportunity to talk with you today.

Metacelsus:

You’re welcome. If there are other things besides communication that you're looking for, like people getting involved with, how can people help? Are you looking to hire smart PhD biologists to work on gene drives, negotiators for political treaties, or things like that?

Michael Santos:

A great thing for people to check out would be the Outreach Network for Gene Drive Research. That's an organization that includes representatives from many different labs and organizations that are working on gene drive in different applications across different fields, so especially for people that are coming more from the research side. One of the things they do that you just mentioned was help people who are interested in engaging in some of these processes. Scientific experts can provide input into some of these discussions, negotiations and governance processes, because that is a really important role for researchers to play. When you go to these meetings, there are a lot of scientists there that are supporting the discussions. I can make sure you have the link for their website and organization. So, people can check that out as well.

Metacelsus:

All right, thank you. It's great talking.

Michael Santos:

I enjoyed it. I definitely appreciated the opportunity. Thanks for connecting.

1. P elements are transposons which naturally spread through wild fruit fly populations and have been proposed as a basis for an engineered gene drive.

2. For example, this 2021 paper by the Crisanti lab targeting the doublesex gene with CRISPR.