In 2021, malaria killed 619,000 people, the majority of them on the African continent. The new prospects for effective control of this mosquito-borne disease therefore raise great hopes. The optimism is now carried by a multinational team of researchers from the Johns-Hopkins-Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the British laboratory GSK. The latter, reports Le Monde, discovered a toxin from a bacterium capable of stopping the development of the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, responsible for malaria.
It is the bacterium Delftia tsuruhatensis TC1 that is at the center of all hopes. Contained in several plants as well as in the tissues and organs of certain mammals, it produces a toxin which inhibits at an early stage the development of the parasite Plasmodium falciparum in the digestive tract of mosquitoes, explain the researchers in an article published on August 3 in the journal Science.
However, this toxin has the ability to cross the tissues of the mosquito. So much so that one could imagine spraying a product based on Delftia tsuruhatensis TC1 on surfaces such as mosquito nets. Promising trials have already been conducted in Burkina Faso.
“This is a major discovery, one that could tip the fight towards eradication,” enthuses Pierre Buffet, medical director of the Institut Pasteur. “We are here in the field of biological control which raises real hopes while the fight against the disease stagnates. »
However, nuance Olivier Silvie, research director at Inserm, “before considering large-scale use, this research must continue to find out if the bacterium and the toxin can have consequences on other organisms, such as insects. pollinators for example, which would be catastrophic”.
For the time being, the bacterium does not appear to pose a danger to human health. To go further, researchers could consider genetically modifying it so that it is transmitted by the female mosquito to her offspring, making it effective in the longer term.
