Building Better Vaccines
The majority of vaccines available today have been developed empirically. That is, attenuate the pathogen, kill the pathogen, use some component of the pathogen, put it into animals, test for antibody to the pathogen and then test for protection. Trial and error. Developers do not understand a lot of the details of why the vaccine works and worse, they don’t understand at all why a vaccine does not work. So, unlike artificial intelligence, there is no learning from failures.
This historical approach had given us many vaccines. BUT, the difficult vaccines, like a vaccine for bovine tuberculosis (TB), African swine fever (ASF), porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) and the contagious caprine and bovine pleuropneumonia’s (CCPP and CBPP) have confounded the empirical approach and remain significant challenges.
Developing new and/or improved vaccines is seldom straight forward. In many cases the work of a specific line of research will reach a critical juncture and lose steam. Instead of researchers continuing to work in isolation and following their own path of trial and error for animal health vaccines, the collective body can build upon earlier work and move the process forward in a more linear path. This is not just an issue of the science behind the research, as there are often practical challenges that hinder progress.
Specifically, highly refined and “validated” mAb development is rarely a linear, easy process. Identifying, collecting and storing (archiving) mAb reagents that already exist, producing each reagent in sufficient quantity and testing samples for quality and integrity, and reagent distribution to all interested vaccine researchers is a time consuming process beyond the scope and capabilities of any given academic laboratory. There must be a focus on keeping the mAb final product affordable for the animal vaccine research community. Historically, this is a process that has not been efficiently or effectively handled by academic researchers, their affiliated institution and/or private, for-profit commercial enterprises working in this field.
NEAH was created to fix this chronic problem shared across the global set of veterinary vaccine R&D laboratories. We embarked on a unique non-profit business model and sustainable solution to the problem of curation of the existing mAb collection, and the production and distribution of mAbs and immune reagents to the veterinary vaccine R&D community. This highly innovative solution will help accelerate the development of affordable, highly effective veterinary vaccines, with a focus toward neglected domestic small ruminant infectious diseases of the developing world and to catalyze other important efforts to address global food security.
NEAH aims to create, archive, catalog, and affordably produce, validate and distribute mAb, rAbs and cytokine reagents specific to immune cells and immune markers. We will exclusively focus on food animal species to help guide researchers in the rational development of new or more effective animal vaccines for a range of critical infectious diseases