New foot-and-mouth vaccine signals huge advance
28/03/2013
Because the vaccine is synthetic, made up of tiny protein shells designed to trigger optimum immune response, it doesn’t rely on growing live infectious virus and is therefore much safer to produce.
It makes transporting and storing the vaccine much easier, and the pre-clinical trials have shown it to be stable at temperatures up to 56°C for at least two hours. The disease is endemic in central Africa and some parts of the Middle East and Asia, so this is a major advantage over the traditional vaccine, which has to be produced and stored in a chilled and stable environment.
The research was led by Professor David Stuart from the Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford and Dr Bryan Charleston, head of the livestock viral diseases programme at The Pirbright Institute, formerly known as the Institute for Animal Health.
Professor Stuart said: “What we have achieved is close to the holy grail of foot-and-mouth vaccines. Unlike the traditional vaccines, there is no chance that the empty shell vaccine could revert to an infectious form. This work will have a broad and enduring impact on vaccine development, and the technology should be transferable to other viruses from the same family, such as poliovirus and hand foot and mouth disease, a human virus which is currently endemic in South East Asia.”
Clinical trials of the vaccine have shown it is as effective as current vaccines. While a commercial product is still several years away, the team hopes the technology can be transferred as quickly as possible to make it available to a global market.
Dr Charleston said: “The ability to produce a vaccine outside of high containment and that does not require a cold storage chain should greatly increase production capacity and reduce costs. Globally there is an undersupply of the vaccine due to the high cost of production and this new development could solve this problem and significantly control foot-and-mouth disease worldwide.”
Foot-and-mouth disease is one of the most economically important diseases in livestock worldwide, with three to four billion doses of vaccine administered every year.
Nigel Gibbens, the UK’s chief veterinary officer, added: “This vaccine is a major breakthrough that has the potential to be an invaluable new weapon in the fight to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease. There are many more years of work and research to be done to get this vaccine ready for use, but this is undoubtedly an exciting leap forward.”
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