AUDIO: Interview with Agragene’s Stephanie Gamez and Matt Helms
Sterile flies are crucial as the cattle industry fights New World screwworm, and a new technology could be the key to eradicating the pest. Stephanie Gamez, the research and development lead for Agragene says the company’s precision-guided sterile insect technique is a game changer. “It uses CRISPR gene editing,” she says. “Pretty much we use this tool to sterilize insect males and also kill females.”
St. Louis-based Agragene was one of 40 projects that received funding from the USDA’s NWS Grand Challenge launched earlier this year.
She tells Brownfield traditional sterile fly methods use radiation. “It works, but it’s not that great,” she says. “Why? Because it affects the health of the insect. You need these insects to be healthy enough to go out there and mate, and to put a halt into the mating cycle.”
Matt Helms, marketing lead, says Agragene’s technique enables the production of healthy, sterile male flies. “The other piece from our technology is they live a certain lifespan and there’s no opportunity for any genetic transfer in the environment,” he says.
Gamez explains how CRISPR technology is used in the company’s sterile insect technique. “We target two genes, one important for male sterility and one important for female lethality,” she says. And through experiments, Gamez says they’ve found this solution. “What we see, in our case is that if you knock out the gene for the male’s sterility, the males are completely sterile, they’re healthy, but they don’t produce any sperm,” she says.
Agragene was selected as a collaborator on projects led by Dr. Max Scott of North Carolina State University and Dr. Molly Duman Scheel of the Indiana University School of Medicine and the University of Notre Dame Eck Institute for Global Health.
