Purchase of an automated "tipper" system to support the culture of infectious gametocytes for experimental malaria mosquito infections

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We are requesting support to purchase three "tipper" systems for automated culture of malaria parasites for mosquito transmission. Malaria is still a disease of devastating impact to global health caused by the parasite Plasmodium. Plasmodium is transmitted by the bite of a mosquito and has a complex life cycle which involves transforming into several distinct forms which are specialised for different roles. Scientists have been able to culture Plasmodium falciparum (which causes the most deadly forms of malaria) in the laboratory for almost half a century. Most scientific research is focused on the asexual stage of the parasite life cycle, as this is the stage that causes disease symptoms and is easy to grow. However, to transmit to mosquitoes, the parasite must transform into gametocytes. Gametocytes are much more challenging to grow in the laboratory as they require 14 days to develop, requiring the researcher to "feed" them daily and never let them cool from body temperature. This means that they are usually laboriously grown in small batches continuously which consumes a lot of time that researchers would otherwise have to focus on experimentation. Experimental mosquito transmission requires access to parasite culture facilities, insectaries to rear mosquitoes and the apparatus and skilled staff to perform the mosquito infection. Taking advantage of these unique resources at LSHTM, we established the Human Malaria Transmission Facility to serve the UK and global malaria community providing researchers without specialised facilities, access to experimental mosquito infection. The Facility is successfully supporting a range of projects, however a bottleneck in manual gametocyte production is limiting further expansion. Another transmission facility in the Netherlands employs bespoke culture systems called "tippers" to automate the daily gametocyte feeding which significantly reduces routine culture maintenance and maintains consistent high quality parasites for experimentation. Purchase of a comparable system will give similar throughput gains for the LSHTM Facility and release additional slots for experimentation and allow us to support of a greater range of transmission projects.