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African swine fever vaccine on the horizon

Prospects for an effective vaccine to control African swine fever (ASF) in pigs have come into sharper focus over recent days.

Fat Pigs And Sows Eat In Livestock Of The Farm
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Prospects for an effective vaccine to control African swine fever (ASF) in pigs have come into sharper focus over recent days. Researchers have developed a vaccine that protected all of the immunized pigs from the disease.

Together with co-workers in Spain and the U.S., scientists based at the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom (U.K.) first created a vectored vaccine. This uses a harmless virus to deliver into pig cells eight selected genes from the ASF virus genome. Behind the idea is that the genes produce viral proteins, which stimulate the pig’s immune system to respond to a subsequent ASF infection.

As the team reports in their paper in the journal Vaccines, all the pigs immunized in this way survived the infection, and were protected when challenged with a potentially lethal ASF virus. The animals developed clinical symptoms, but they survived.