Mosquito Staging Apparatus for Producing PfSPZ Malaria Vaccines

摘要

This paper describes the design of a fully automated apparatus to dispense mosquitoes into isolate units. This automation system consists of several process units including (1) facilitating the water vortex with a fan-shape rotor to gently transport the mosquitoes to the sorting slides with a conical geometry, (2) exploiting slides to guide mosquitoes to turntables driven by gears one by one, and (3) reorienting the mosquito until its proboscis points outward along the radial direction of the cone, aided by computer vision. This automation system serves as the first processing stage for collecting mosquito salivary glands. The sporozoites contained in the mosquito glands are the source material to produce Sanaria’s first generation PfSPZ vaccines. The Mosquito Staging System can dramatically enhance the mass production of Malaria Vaccine which is essential to prevent the propagation of Malaria.