A Dallas Biotech Says It Can Wipe Out the Flesh-Eating Screwworm in the U.S. for Good -- In a Year, Not Decades [View all]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/dallas-biotech-says-wipe-flesh-143000427.html

For sixty years, the United States has fought the New World screwworm essentially the same way: by drowning it in its own kind. Billions of sterilized flies, released season after season, generation after generation, holding the line so the flesh-eating parasite can't breed its way back.

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The company *Colossal) isn't proposing to manage the screwworm. It's proposing to end it. The tool is a gene drive — a single edit to the parasitic fly's genome that, unlike a normal trait, passes to virtually every offspring instead of half.

Colossal's approach engineers that change so it produces infertile females. Once released, the trait spreads through the population on its own, moving from generation to generation like a built-in genetic off switch, until no fertile females remain and the population collapses.

Colossal calls the approach "genetic biocontrol," and says that where the old method takes decades, gene-drive flies could clear an infested zone in a matter of months.

The pitch is as much economic as scientific.