Leveraging interactions for vector control

Traditional mosquito control methods, such as insecticides or habitat reduction, have helped limit disease transmission but face critical challenges. For instance, insecticide resistance is rapidly evolving, making chemical control less effective. Additionally, vaccines and treatment for mosquito-borne diseases are limited. This highlights the urgent need for new, innovative strategies to control arbovirus transmission at its source: the mosquito itself.

One promising avenue is harnessing naturally occurring interactions—between viruses, bacteria, and the mosquito host—to develop self-sustaining, evolution-resistant control strategies. A major breakthrough in mosquito control has been the use of endosymbiotic bacteria like Wolbachia to block arbovirus transmission. Similarly, some ISVs naturally suppress arboviruses and identifying ISVs that consistently reduce infection could lead to their use in mosquito populations.

However, some ISVs interfere with arboviruses while some facilitate arbovirus infections. Therefore understanding the mechanisms of these virus-virus and virus-host interactions is essential. This way it is also possible to explore ways to engineer interference separately from ISVs. This can be done by genetically modifying mosquitoes to suppress arboviruses directly or using bacteria to deliver any effector molecules.

In addition, ISVs and arboviruses follow different transmission strategies; understanding which host-virus interactions shapes these transmission dynamics for phylogenetically close viruses could reveal ways to push arboviruses toward reduced transmissibility.