Mos(kit)o project presented by the 2016 iGEM team at WHO TDR in Geneva

In October 2016 in Boston, the second iGEM team set up by the Institut Pasteur to participate in the prestigious annual MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) competition to promote research in the area of synthetic biology brought home a gold medal for its "Mos(kit)o" project. The project also came first in three categories: Best Diagnostics Project, Best Applied Design Project and Best Entrepreneurship Project.

On the back of this outstanding performance, the interdisciplinary team – composed of BTS advanced technical diploma students from ETSL, Bachelor's/Master's students in biology from Pierre & Marie Curie University (UPMC) and Paris Diderot University, law students from the Jean Monnet Faculty (Paris Saclay), engineering students from ESPCI and industrial design students from ENSCI-Les Ateliers – continued to develop the project, which was subsequently awarded a Grand Challenges Africa grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2017. Thanks to this award, the team is now carrying out several field tests in Senegal with teams from the Institut Pasteur in Dakar. The aim is to roll out the project as widely as possible for the purposes of detecting pathogens, especially arboviruses (the viruses responsible for dengue, Zika and chikungunya), and mapping infected mosquitoes.

Recently, the innovative nature of this collective project led to several members of the team being asked to present their work at the WHO Special Program for Research & Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR), based in Geneva. On April 10, the project representatives had the opportunity to present the various aspects of Mos(kit)o at a seminar and then in an interview with TDR coordinator Raman Velayudhan. Mos(kit)o looks set for a promising future as a rare tool for capture, detection and mapping supported by WHO.

Watch this space!

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From left to right : Mehdi Morel, Thomas Vialon, Marina Maletic, Mathieu Hubert and Deshmukh Gopaul