

Harvard Engineers Develop Robot to Help Fight Malaria - snakedyourwave
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/05/07/mosquito-harvest/Qxto58qtpGHhRVfliT6aHI/story.html

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webmaven
From the headline I imagined autonomous drones sucking mosquitoes into traps,
or perhaps mosquito-sized drones interfering with their reproduction somehow.

I did NOT expect a Kickstarter campaign to fund a robot that beheads
individual mosquitoes and extracts their salivary glands in order to
manufacture a vaccine.

The world is truly becoming stranger than we can imagine.

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snakedyourwave
Yea man, this Nature article about the vaccine seems as surprised as you
[http://www.nature.com/news/zapped-malaria-parasite-raises-
va...](http://www.nature.com/news/zapped-malaria-parasite-raises-vaccine-
hopes-1.13536)

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rmah
This is an awesome project. Deserving of one's donation far beyond 99.9% of
the other crowdfunding projects out there.

But why isn't the NIH or FDA or NSF or even the WHO funding this? Has
government funding for health care dried up to this degree?

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snakedyourwave
They posted a video response on their Indiegogo:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgPbBAa6dj0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgPbBAa6dj0)

As I understand it, there are two reasons as to why they've turned to
crowdfunding. One, large funding bodies are more concerned with the vaccine's
clinical trials right now, and will worry about scale up of vaccine production
when the time comes. Two, with respect to reason one (and the ignorance of the
aforementioned funding bodies), Sanaria wants to do all it can to keep vaccine
production costs down and vaccine supply high so that the eventual price/dose
in a developing context is as low as possible, hence the development of a
dissection robot.

The CEO has also mentioned on various interviews/IAmA that the price/dose for
the US Military and avg. Western traveler will be significantly more expensive
in order to help keep the price down for underserved populations.
([http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1k164k/iama_stephen_l_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1k164k/iama_stephen_l_hoffman_the_ceo_of_sanaria_inc/))

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spiritplumber
This is truly awesome!

If anyone wants, I have the schematics for a bat chirper (pretends to make bat
sounds) to keep mosquitos away and attract bats.

