Progress in Development of an Automated Mosquito Salivary Gland Extractor: A Step Forward to Malaria Vaccine Mass Production

• Main Authors: Li, Wanze, Zhang, Zhuoqun, He, Zhuohong, Vora, Parth, Lai, Alan, Vagvolgyi, Balazs, Leonard, Simon, Goodridge, Anna, Iordachita, Iulian, Chakravarty, Sumana, Sim, Kim Lee, Hoffman, Stephen L., Taylor, Russell H.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Automation; Computer Vision; Conferences; Design; Malaria Vaccine; Mass production; Micro-robotics; Pandemics; Parallelism; Production; Salivary glands; Service robots; Training
• ISSN: 2161-8089
• DOI: 10.1109/CASE49439.2021.9551500

Malaria causes more than 200 million clinical illnesses and 45 million deaths every year, making mass production of an effective vaccine increasingly urgent. A Plasmodium falciparum sporozoites (PfSPZ) based vaccine has been proved to be a promising choice to defend against the malaria pandemic. However, large scale industrial production of PfSPZ vaccine is currently sub-optimal as the process for sporozoite extraction from salivary glands of infected mosquitoes is performed by manual microdissection, a relatively inefficient process requiring many hours of training. This paper reports continued progress in our development of a robotic system for automating the extraction of salivary glands. Compared to our previous versions, the structure of the new system is optimized to be more compact and allows different steps in workflow to be performed in parallel. We also report continued progress in developing key subsystem components. Finally, experiments show encouraging results with success rates of 90% in robotic mosquito manipulation, 95.6% in salivary gland extraction and 92.7% in debris disposal.