Policy Brief: The Potential of Gene Drive Technology to Control and Eliminate Malaria in Africa.
Infographics: Facts about mosquitoes
Glossary of Terms
The technology space has some tricky jargon. The world emerging health technologies is just as nuanced. To help journalists and advocates alike, we’ve defined a few of the most popular terms from both industries.
Gene drive technology
A gene drive is a process in which an organism is engineered to bias the inheritance of desired traits from parent to offspring through sexual reproduction. Genes usually have a 50/50 chance of being inherited, but the gene drive increases the chance to almost 100%. This effect allows the desired traits to spread rapidly through the population over the course of generations.
Genetically Modified Mosquitoes
These are male mosquitos that have been modified so that they are
sterile.
Synthetic Biology
Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a field of science that involves redesigning organisms for useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities. Not to be confused with genome editing where scientists use tools to make smaller changes to the organism’s own DNA, in synthetic biology, scientists stitch together long stretches of DNA and insert them into an organism’s genome. These synthesized pieces of DNA could be genes that are found in other organisms or they could be entirely novel.
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Synthetic-Biology
Genome Editing
Genome editing (also called gene editing) is a group of technologies that give scientists the ability to change an organism’s DNA. These technologies allow genetic material to be added, removed, or altered at particular locations in the genome.
Several approaches to genome editing have been developed. A recent one is known as CRISPR-Cas9, which is short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9.
Civil Societies Organizations (CSOs)
According to the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) include non-state, not-for-profit, voluntary entities formed by people in the social sphere that are separate from the state and the market. They can include community-based organizations as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Health Tech platform works closely with Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to increase their understanding of emerging new technologies so that they can advocate for supportive policy and regulatory frameworks and investments that enable the development, testing and use of these technologies. CSOs are also playing a role in enhancing communities’ understanding of these new technologies.