  Malaria is the one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in many
developing countries. The development of a highly effective and readily
deployable vaccine represents a major goal for world health. There has been
recent progress in developing a clinically effective vaccine manufactured using
Plasmodium falciparum sporozoites (PfSPZ) extracted from the salivary glands of
Anopheles sp. Mosquitoes. The harvesting of PfSPZ requires dissection of the
mosquito and manual removal of the salivary glands from each mosquito by
trained technicians. While PfSPZ-based vaccines have shown highly promising
results, the process of dissection of salivary glands is tedious and labor
intensive. We propose a mechanical device that will greatly increase the rate
of mosquito dissection and deskill the process to make malaria vaccines more
affordable and more readily available. This device consists of several
components: a sorting stage in which the mosquitoes are sorted into slots, a
cutting stage in which the heads are removed, and a squeezing stage in which
the salivary glands are extracted and collected. This method allows mosquitoes
to be dissected twenty at a time instead of one by one as previously done and
significantly reduces the dissection time per mosquito.
