African Swine Fever
Background: African swine fever (ASF) is a highly contagious hemorrhagic disease that causes high rates of death among domestic pigs. The disease is caused by ASF virus (ASFV), and the extreme antigenic diversity of the virus is one of the main obstacles to developing a safe and efficacious vaccine against ASF.[1]
CEEZAD’s response: Absence of an effective and safe vaccine against ASF severely hampers strategies for disease control and eradication. The goal of the project is to develop an efficacious vaccine against ASF. This goal is being pursued using a new approach to ASFV vaccinology: heterologous prime-boost vaccination, combining ASFV antigens from both DNA vaccination and recombinant ASFV proteins. Researchers will vaccinate and challenge pigs with rational combinations of these constructs using our prime-boost approach, focusing on those constructs that are the most immunogenic.
Investigators: Principal Investigator is Dr. Yolanda Revilla Novella, Head of the ASFV Laboratory at CBMSO in Madrid, Spain. Co-Principal Investigators are Dr. Juergen Richt, Regents Distinguished Professor of Diagnostic Medicine and Pathobiology at Kansas State University.
The goal: African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) is a double-stranded DNA virus shown to infect both domestic pigs and feral European and North American swine. African Swine Fever remains one of the major viral diseases of swine for which a commercial vaccine is lacking; disease control is presently based on rapid and accurate diagnosis and culling of infected animals. Deliverables for the project will be: initially a safe vaccine vaccine approach with demonstrable immunogenicity in swine; ultimately an efficacious vaccination strategy for use in preventing major economic losses in the United States in the event of an ASF outbreak in North America and worldwide.