The Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio said it will open its high-containment laboratories to a British biotechnology company to develop new tools against the New World screwworm, a new front in the response as the U.S. case count reached 32.
Under the agreement, reported July 6 by Texas Public Radio and the San Antonio Report, researchers from Flyttr — the England-based pest-management firm formerly known as Oxitec — will use Texas Biomed’s biosafety labs over the next two years to study “next-generation genetic approaches” to the sterile insect technique that underpins the current eradication effort.
Texas Biomed President Dr. Larry Schlesinger said the partnership could eventually produce a sterile-fly-releasing facility in San Antonio, though he cautioned the plans are not final. “The goal is to do that in new facilities in San Antonio,” Schlesinger told TPR, “but that’s still in progress.”
Flyttr chief executive Grey Frandsen framed the work as a supplement to existing methods rather than a replacement. “Traditional tools like SIT, while necessary, are not sufficient to win this war,” Frandsen said. “We’re mobilizing experts, equipment, technology, partners, and our global infrastructure to develop next-generation solutions.”
The research push comes as detections continue to climb. The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed the parasite in a domestic sheep in Crockett County, bringing the national total to 32 cases across Texas and New Mexico, Hoosier Ag Today reported July 5. The outbreak began June 3, when USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service confirmed the fly in a three-week-old calf in Zavala County, about 100 miles west of San Antonio — the first case in Texas since 1966. Cases have since been confirmed in 11 other Texas counties, according to TPR.
New World screwworm is a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on the living tissue of warm-blooded animals and can kill an untreated host. Livestock and wildlife are most at risk; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the public-health risk to people remains very low.
The pest was eradicated from the United States and Central America by the early 2000s using the sterile insect technique, in which lab-raised sterile males are released to mate with wild females and produce no offspring, shrinking the population over successive generations. The fly was detected again in Mexico in 2024 and moved north toward the border.
The genetics work is one of several efforts to expand and modernize that toolkit. The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research announced a $300,000 investment partnering the biotechnology company Agragene with researchers at North Carolina State University to develop genetically sterile male flies intended to outperform the irradiated insects used today, Hoosier Ag Today reported.
Scaling the conventional approach remains the near-term challenge: experts have estimated that roughly 500 million sterile flies must be released each week to push back the current outbreak. A sterile-fly production facility is under construction in Edinburg but is not expected to open until 2027, and officials say it alone will not meet the volumes eradication requires.
The stakes are economic as well as agricultural. Texas Biomed put the value of the state’s cattle industry at $41 billion, and Schlesinger cast the screwworm’s return as another crisis the institute is reacting to rather than one that was prevented. “These opportunities are coming at a faster pace than ever before,” he said.