Targeted pesticides

There is all this talk about personalized and targeted medicines, but where are the targeted pesticides?
I have poison ivy near where I live, and I want to get rid of it, but thanks to root grafting if I spray the poison ivy with Roundup or a similar herbicide I am as likely to kill all of the trees as I am the poison ivy.
However, Monsanto makers of Roundup could easily make a spray that does not kill the poison ivy, would just inhibit one or more of the enzymes required for the production of urushiol. (Urusiol is the poison in poison ivy, and it isn’t actually a poison it just causes an autoimmune cascade.) By preventing the plant from producing urushiol it would no longer be poison ivy. If we got very lucky or planned very well the enzymatic inhibition would cause a toxic build up in the plant which would either kill it out right or make it less fit so other vines would out grow it.

A spray like this would free people up to enjoy the outdoors. If it wasn’t a general herbicide it could be sprayed from planes or trucks on nature trails, and summer camps. Kids would still need to be taught to avoid poison ivy, but if they couldn’t then this spray might let them avoid paying the price.

Similarly mosquitoes are vulnerable, since their saliva must contain special proteins that help them feed (they have to modulate the target’s immune system and prevent clotting) and recent research has shown that more than 20 of these proteins are not found in mammals. This means we can produce agents (as in a cocktail of drugs to prevent the mosquitoes from becoming resistant) that interfere with these proteins, and hinder the mosquitoes’ ability to feed. This won’t wipe them out but it will certainly reduce their fitness, which will reduce the size of the population. As long as the agents we create don’t have negative environmental impact (like DDT) we can spray them generally to control the population in wider areas. Similarly we could create drugs that people would take like malaria pills (or as part of malaria pills) to prevent the immuno-suppression caused by mosquito bites which some believe is why mosquitoes are such a good vector for illness.

This type of targeted approach could also work to make drugs that inhibit the production of critical proteins in tsetse fly saliva and break the chain of infection for Sleeping Sickness.

Targeted pesticides might not be as glamorous as personalized medicine but because the target is bigger, the money is there and stable. The benefits to humanity are greater as well, sure I want to sit on my patio and not be bothered by mosquitoes, but my desire for this adds voice to a product that could free huge parts of the world from the crippling grip of disease.