Partnerships to scale capacity
To support expansion of the project, NEA will be increasing the production of male Wolbachia-Aedes mosquitoes from about 2 million males per week to 5 million males per week. Increased capacity for expansion of Project Wolbachia is made possible by NEA’s collaboration with our partners Orinno Technology Pte. Ltd. (Orinno), Verily Life Sciences (Verily), and the National Robotics Programme, which is a multi-agency national programme that looks at the end-to-end development of differentiating robotic enablers and solutions in Singapore.
Orinno co-develops engineering solutions for the mass production and release of male Wolbachia-Aedes mosquitoes using automation and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Verily complements NEA’s mosquito production and release efforts and has contributed to the gender-sorting and release of male Wolbachia-Aedes mosquitoes at the Tampines and Marine Parade study sites.
Evolution of automated systems for large-scale rearing of male Wolbachia-Aedes mosquitoes
Novel automated modules have been developed and replaced previous manual production processes to improve consistency, productivity and scalability of large-scale rearing and field releases of quality male mosquitoes. As of June 2022,
nine modules have been developed and have substantially improved productivity, standardised production quality, and enhanced workers’ health and safety by reducing or eliminating reliance on repetitive manual processing.
Overall, the technological developments have improved the efficiency of mosquito production by up to 40 times as compared manual processes. This has also allowed Project Wolbachia – Singapore to increase the production of stable high-quality mosquitoes and expand to more areas to fight against dengue.