SAN DIEGO – Taking a new approach at eradicating one of the most annoying and disease-prone pests, the startup Synvect has developed a way of making male mosquitoes infertile and females incapable of flight.
The company already has received about $22 million in funding and is eight months into the process to achieve U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approval, which usually takes between 18 months and two years.
Funding sources include the EPA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institute of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development agency of the U.S. Defense Department.
Synvect also received a $1.7 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which runs the nonprofit Target Malaria and funds mosquito-killing technology that uses CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gene editing.
Locally, the NuFund Venture Group board has voted to invest at least $250,000 in Synvect.
NuFund member Akash Pai advocated for the Synvect funding.
“It’s a very, very interesting idea,” he said. “I think a lot of us in the group tend to invest in disruptive ideas, which we think will change the world.”
University Origins
Work on the technology began when Synvect CEO Nikolay Kandul and company co-founder Omar Akbari, now a UC San Diego professor, were postdoctoral biology students at CalTech.
The students studied gene drive, a process of inserting a genetic element into an organism to modify a genetic trait.
CEO
Synvect
“Essentially, we realized that gene drives are very hard to build, but at the same time we could use genetics to optimize traditional old technologies that worked very well,” Kandul said.
Sterile insect technique (SIT) was an idea developed in Russia in the 1930s and was successfully tested on fruit flies in the United States in the 1950s.
“Essentially you release a lot of sterilized males and females, and many mosquito females mate only once in their lifetime, so you can suppress a population in a biological way,” he said.
While SIT worked on fruit flies, there was a problem with mosquitos because their pupae are aquatic, so they can only be released as adults.
The other problem is that the mosquitos still will bite after they are released, meaning they can still spread diseases before their population collapses, he said.
Only female mosquitoes bite because they need the blood for egg production, so the challenge was to use gene modification to prevent females from mating.
“How we do it is very precise, because using CRISPR, we knock out two genes,” Kandul said.
One gene is altered to make females unable to fly and the other is altered to make males sterile. Although they are sterile, the males still are very competitive with sterile males. If the sterile male mates with a female, the female will not mate again so will not produce a pupae.
In another breakthrough, they developed a method of breeding mosquitoes in the lab, with a female laying 50 to 100 eggs at a time. The dry eggs can be stored for up to six months in pods, which then can be taken to a location where someone will place them in a shady spot, add water, and wait for the pupae to form.
Kandul anticipates 3,000 to 5,000 eggs may be transported and released as mosquitos.
The goal is to have this population of sterile males in the local environment, like a dome of protection, so they all mate with any virgin females,” he said.
“You want to do it at least three or five times, and maybe kind of continue doing it for the entire mosquito season because there will be females migrating from other places,” Kandul said. “Essentially that’s where the business model is coming from.”
Backyard Use
“It serves two purposes,” Synvect co-founder Pooja Patel said about their product.
“It’s not just for mosquito disease suppression, but also for bites,” she said. “Essentially since you’re eliminating females through the release of eggs in our products, you’re not going to get bitten or not bitten as often.”
Patel said the product can be a replacement for pesticides that are sprayed in neighborhoods.
Co-founder
Synvect
“Up until now, pesticides were working effectively, but because of insecticide and pesticide resistance, there is this growing need for more innovative non-toxic solutions like this. So it’s not just for the sub-Saharan African countries but we really see it as a product for places like the U.S. as well.”
The Synvect product is targeting the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, which San Diegans know as the ankle-biter mosquito and can carry 25 diseases. As an invasive species, Kandul said it could be eradicated locally without any biological harm by using Synvect’s process.
Because the company has developed a platform rather than a single product that affects just one insect species, Kandul said Synvect’s technology can adjusted and used on other pests.
Synvect
FOUNDED: 2022
CEO: Nikolay Kandul
HEADQUARTERS: La Jolla
BUSINESS: Biological pest control
FUNDING: About $22 million
EMPLOYEES: 5
WEBSITE: https://www.synvect.com
NOTABLE: The startup has received $1.7 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has a focus on eradicating, eliminating or controlling tropical diseases.
