Purchase of an automated “tipper” system to support the culture of infectious gametocytes for experimental malaria mosquito infections

Culturing P. falciparum gametocytes in vitro is technically challenging, expensive and laborious, as they require daily medium changes for 14 consecutive days and strict adherence to maintaining a constant temperature of 37 degrees C throughout to ensure that they do not prematurely activate (temperature decrease is a stimulus for mosquito stage development). As a consequence, manual culture maintenance consumes a significant proportion of a transmission stage researcher’s daily routine and limits time for downstream experimentation.

Tippers were first developed in the 1980s by researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands and are still used routinely in their transmission facility and commercial spinoff company TropiQ Health Sciences. They consist of multiple bespoke glass culture vessels enabling the culture of different parasite lines/treatment conditions simultaneously. Every 12 hours, the system injects fresh culture medium into holding chambers in the glass vessels to warm to 37 degrees C. It then “tips” off the spent culture medium from the parasites and replaces it with the warm fresh medium. This enables “hands-off” culture of gametocytes for the entire 14-day culture period, resulting in high quality gametocytes with a high mosquito infectivity, something that is difficult achieve consistently by manual culturing. Having access to this equipment will enable the Human Malaria Transmission Facility to increase the throughput of gametocyte production greatly, thereby overcoming an important bottleneck in the set up of experiments and increasing the number of projects the Facility can undertake for the members of the malaria research community.

Project details

Financing & Economics

Nov 2022 — Mar 2023

$132,541

United Kingdom