Vaccine innovations: from concept to impact
Infectious diseases of pigs cause major financial losses and threaten food security, animal welfare and public health. Vaccination is a highly cost-effective tool to help prevent, control, and even eradicate diseases. Vaccines are traditionally inactivated and live attenuated pathogen products. For some diseases these vaccine modalities are highly effective, for others, they may provide clinical benefit by reducing disease severity, but fail to effectively control pathogens, and for some diseases, such vaccines are either ineffective or pose safety concerns. This has necessitated the research and development of alternative vaccine strategies.
Swine medicine has frequently been at the forefront of developing and adopting novel vaccine concepts and technologies. Notable examples to be discussed include: (i) establishment of the differentiation of infected from vaccinated animals (DIVA) vaccine concept to enhance disease control, (ii) development of a chimeric virus vaccine that enabled emergency vaccination strategies; (iii) the licensing of the first RNA vaccine platform, which rapidly provides US producers with vaccines to combat emerging swine influenza virus strains; and (iv) development of needle-free transdermal immunisation devices to improve animal welfare, dose efficiency and traceability.
However, significant challenges remain which require innovative approaches. I will close the lecture by introducing some of the advanced approaches being pursued to develop effective vaccines against the hypervariable porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus and safe and effective vaccines to combat the African swine fever panzootic.