The Current Challenges in Animal Health Vaccine Research
The current process for developing new or better vaccines for livestock animal diseases frequently fails to meet the ideal product profile in a cost effective, timely manner.
Vaccines for new, emerging and neglected infectious diseases of domestic food animals, especially small ruminants in the developing and developed world need to be:
- Fast acting:to quickly protect the animal, herd, or flock
- Strong acting: to ensure the animal is fully protected and won’t spread the disease to susceptible animals
- Long acting:to protect the animal, herd or flock through the production life cycle
- Durable: to maximize the host protective immune response following disease exposure in the natural environment
Researching, developing, producing and distributing animal vaccines is a long, complex and expensive process that typically take several years. Before a new vaccine can be produced and distributed there is much work that must be done in the laboratory. The process typically requires the coordination and cooperation of a range of academic researchers, institutions, NGO’s, government agencies and private businesses.
At present, unlike for human and mouse, there is no single organization in livestock research focused on providing a sustainable and comprehensive collection of biologic reagents (mainly monoclonal antibodies, mAbs) for measuring protective immunity required to rationally guide the vaccine research and development (R&D) process. The mAbs to immune markers in the blood are critical to the analysis of immune responses following immunization, indicating if a vaccine will protect an animal from a dangerous bacterial, viral or parasitic disease by stimulating the desired immune response. Only a small fraction of mAbs are routinely available using current distribution systems (commercial companies and academic collaborators). Continued availability of antibody reagents is crucial to enable researchers to better understand vaccine-induced immunity and improve upon current sub-optimal commercial and developmental vaccines.
The process for procuring these important highly specialized, mAbs and other veterinary immune reagents is haphazard, inefficient and unreliable. Historically, funded grants to scientists have lacked the critical component of reagent distribution, especially already established reagents. It is clear that the current distribution systems (academic lab-based ad hoc research production or for-profit commercial production) of immunological reagents to support vaccine R&D for small ruminants and other animal source food species, does not lend itself to a workable outcome.
It is not glamorous, but the successful path to development, distribution and deployment of animal vaccines must build from a strong foundation of basic and translational research underpinned by a reliable supply chain of validated immunological reagents. The protective immune response to any effective vaccine is mediated by specialized cells in the blood (referred to as innate, effector or memory immune cells). During the vaccine R&D process, it is critical to fully monitor and understand the response of these specialized cells and use this information to further refine and make improvements to the vaccine being developed.
The US, UK, and EU governments, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, have all identified the need to assemble and distribute a reliable collection of curated and validated immune reagents, such as mAbs, as a critical gap that must be addressed.
NEAH is committed to supporting the basic and applied science of veterinary vaccinology to develop new and effective animal health vaccines, especially for small ruminants. We will produce and distribute existing reagents as well as develop new reagents for assessing immune responses of food animal species to vaccination.