The Royal Society Pfizer award to Abdoulaye Diabaté
Abdoulaye Diabaté will receive the Royal Society Pfizer Award 4 November for his work on the biology of male Anopheles mosquitoes and methods to interrupt mosquito mating. Dr Diabaté is head of medical entomology at the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Sante/ Centre Muraz in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, and began his research many years ago with a TDR re-entry grant on mosquito mating behaviour. This is the start of a new series of profiles on TDR alumni.
Though he was only five years old at the time, Abdoulaye Diabaté remembers it like it was yesterday: the burning fever, the sheets soaked with perspiration, his mother and father standing over him, worriedly whispering.
Growing up in a small village in the southwest corner of Burkina Faso, Diabaté suffered through many bouts of malaria, the country’s leading cause of death. But that first experience remains etched in his memory: “I can still see myself on the bed, and the fear on my parents’ faces,” he says. “They knew I might not make it. They were terrified.”
A curious child, he was naturally drawn to research, he says, and in high school he became serious about science. “It may sound funny, but it was the day I learned that human beings could precisely calculate the size of the earth and send satellites to the moon. I had so much admiration for the great minds who devoted their lives to solving these problems. Right then, I knew that I would like to be a scientist.”
There is now a global consensus that new intervention tools are needed, and an understanding of male mating behaviour will be instrumental to their development and implementation.
Diabaté followed that dream to the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Sante (IRSS) / Centre Muraz in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second largest city, where he enrolled in a doctorate programme on insecticide resistance. Upon earning his PhD, he was awarded a TDR re-entry grant to conduct research on mosquito mating behavior. Intended to promote the career development of young scientists from disease endemic countries, the grant was a crucial source of support, he says, allowing him to study a topic that was, at the time, of marginal interest to many in the malaria research community.
“For decades, the biology of male Anopheles mosquitoes has been neglected for the simple reason that males don’t bite and, hence, don’t transmit malaria,” says Diabaté. Yet, he adds, with the increasing emergence of drug and insecticide resistance, scientists have begun to seriously challenge the standard female-focused approaches to vector control, examining ways to inhibit swarming and interrupt mosquito mating. “There is now a global consensus that new intervention tools are needed, and an understanding of male mating behavior will be instrumental to their development and implementation.”
Diabaté left Burkina Faso for the first time in 2005 when he took a postdoc position in the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland USA. A member of Dr Tovi Lehmann’s research group in the Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research, he developed on his own studies on the mating behavior of Anopheles gambiae, the main malaria vector in Africa, as well as on the post-mating barriers between its various molecular forms. By the time he left in 2009, he had co-authored papers on the role of body size in mating, the structure and dynamics of male swarms, and the influence of breeding sites on larval development.
“I made tremendous progress with Dr. Lehmann,” he recalls. “And then I was lucky enough to get an MIM/TDR grant to continue that work back home.” Awarded by the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM)/TDR Task Force on Malaria Research Capability Strengthening in Africa, the latter provided support to African research groups for the development of malaria control tools with the aim of promoting partnerships and collaboration. And that’s precisely what Diabaté did, teaming up with his colleague Frederic Tripet at the University of Keele in the UK on studies demonstrating that swarms of Anopheles gambiae use distinctive landmarks to gather and mate. “That predictability makes it easy not only to control the mosquito reproduction rate,” he says, “but also to accurately estimate key parameters involved in malaria transmission.”
The results generated by that TDR grant helped earn Diabaté the African Research Leader Scheme, a prestigious award jointly funded by the British Medical Research Council and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), providing an important boost to his budding career. Now head of medical entomology at IRSS, Diabaté continues to partner with Tripet on vector research, as well as on the development of a novel control tool designed to exploit some of the male mosquito’s inherent biological traits.
As described in a paper recently published in the Malaria Journal, the so-called “Lehmann funnel entry trap,” which can be mounted on a window, is capable of attracting and killing both insecticide resistant and susceptible mosquitos without the use of an insecticide. That’s particularly important given the increasing prevalence of pyrethroid resistance, which threatens to rob control programmes of one of their most potent weapons. According to Diabaté, the Lehmann trap represents a promising alternative, and one he hopes will attract more funding. “I am completely confident in the potential of this trap to cut down mosquito density,” he says. “I believe it will play a major role in vector control in the coming years.”
Last August, in recognition of his innovative work, Diabaté was presented with the 2013 Royal Pfizer Award. Designed to promote science capacity building in disease endemic countries, the award is given annually to an Africa-based research scientist at the outset of his or her career, and includes a US$ 95 000 grant as well as a US$ 8000 prize.
The Royal Society Pfizer Award was set up in 2006 to recognize innovative contribution to biological science which has made a positive sustainable impact in Africa. This prestigious award is designed to reward scientists working in Africa at the outset of their career and to promote science capacity building in the developing world.
Diabaté, say colleagues, was well deserving of the honor. “I do not know of a finer scientist who studies the ecology of African anophelines,” said Tovi Lehmann, his former mentor at the NIH. “He is highly productive, many of his current studies are innovative, and I’m convinced that he will continue to contribute greatly to medical entomology and the advancement of research and education wherever he will be.”
For more information, please contact:
Makiko Kitamura
TDR Communications Officer
Telephone: +41 22 791 2926
email: kitamuram@who.int