Teenage Scientists Working on Turning Mosquitos Into 'Flying Syringes' to Deliver Vaccines

A team of teenagers interested in biotechnology is working on turning mosquitos into “flying syringes” to deliver vaccines to humans. Their company, Provita Pharmaceuticals

, has already presented its research to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and has submitted a grant idea to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Provita’s sixteen-year old CEO Joshua Meier was a finalist in the 2012 Google Science Fair and a student at the Bergen County Academies. After teaming up with several other kids interested in biotechnology and business, Meier founded the company and started work on a business plan to support their research.

The first goal of the flying syringe project is to bioengineer mosquitoes to deliver vaccinations against the West Nile Virus. Most of the research is conducted on the Bergen County Academies high school campus and is owned and paid for by the school.

“We can’t really culture mosquitoes in the lab at our high school because that’s dangerous, but we a have research adviser and ideas planned out, and the next step is making a partnership, contacting other places that do have animal facilities,” said Meier. Their project has also caught the attention of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, which has expressed its interest in helping with future development of the firm.

The team’s first project called Coagula aims to help people with hemophilia and von Willebrand disease by enabling patients to take fewer treatments for their conditions, while reducing the possibility of infections. Coagula is still under development, Meier said.