North American red fox rabies immunity gene drive for safer (sub)urban rewilding

Animal-transmitted diseases such as rabies represent a barrier to successful rewilding and threaten continued human-wildlife co-existence. In North America, population growth and human settlement expansion lead to encounters with wild mammals which have the potential to transmit rabies to domestic dogs and humans. The recent development of gene drives mediated by CRISPR-Cas9 allows for ecosystem engineering at unprecedented scales given the potential to spread new traits through wild populations with biased inheritance exceeding the pattern of classical Mendelian dominant genes. This study of a possible red fox rabies immunity gene drive project contributes a novel proposal to the existing academic conversation about suitable applications of gene drive technology in wild animal populations, such as projects to fight malaria and Lyme disease. Noting the unique characteristics of rabies, such as the dire mortality rate in humans once symptoms arise, as well as the tendency for rabid wild animals to lose their fear of humans, it appears to be a suitable target for eventual eradication via gene drive to spread immunity through wild mammal reservoir populations. Introducing heritable rabies immunity into North American red fox populations through gene drive represents a strategy to both battle rabies and adjust the ecology of (sub)urban environments. Given this review of the project's possible implementation and expected outcomes, providing inherited rabies immunity to wild red fox populations in North America via gene drive appears both feasible and sensible. Similar projects may be used to eradicate comparable infectious diseases from other wild animal populations, with likely benefits to human patients, wildlife and ecosystems.