Scientists have a radical new plan for controlling mosquito numbers and fighting malaria: lacing human blood with a drug that’s poisonous for the insects, so sucking on this blood marks their last meal.
The drug in question is nitisinone, and a proof-of-concept study led by a team from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK found that it could be deadly to mosquitoes at a low dose in human blood.
When mosquitoes fed on the blood of three people who were already taking nitisinone to treat a genetic disorder, the insects died within 12 hours.
Nitisinone already has regulatory approval for treating certain rare, inherited diseases. It works by blocking the production of a specific protein, which leads to reduced toxic disease byproducts in the human body. But when mosquitoes drink blood with nitisinone, they quickly die.
MORE:
https://www.sciencealert.com/drug-for-rare-disease-turns-human-blood-into-mosquito-poison
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00973-9?linkId=13775196