Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Cure4Aqua (Curing EU aquaculture by co-creating health and welfare innovations)
Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2024-04-30
Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food-producing sectors, where the innovation has been driving improvements in the efficiency, competitiveness, and overall sustainability. However, the efficient and cost-effective control of pathogens is among the main challenges for European aquaculture, which is further complicated by the unpredictable effects of threats like climate change and antimicrobial resistance. Cure4Aqua strives to actively engage key stakeholders to jointly improve the resilience of EU aquaculture under environmental, biological and socio-economic stress, setting the framework for a holistic co-development and evaluation of the solutions it will develop. These solutions include: i) the develop of cost-effective vaccines to prevent bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases of economic significance to EU aquaculture; ii) identify epigenetic and microbiome markers to be integrated to selective breeding programs to improve stress and disease management through epigenetic and microbiome conditioning; iii) alleviate the pressure of global antimicrobial resistance by developing bio-based and sustainable solutions as an alternative to antibiotics; iv) develop new tools and technology to improve health and welfare monitoring at the fish farm level, and diagnostics; v) set the fish welfare at the foreground of aquaculture production, through the development of high welfare standards; and lastly vi) ensure effective external communication, dissemination and exploitation of project activities and results to all relevant target groups.
There are various areas of work within Cure4Aqua that will provide unique contributions towards the outcomes expected by EC. By linking the epigenetics and microbiome to rearing conditions, disease outbreaks and stress, and setting up systems for collecting and analysing data in a cloud platform from fish and environmental sensors monitoring, Cure4Aqua will provide unique insights on how the monitored species react to farming conditions and the effects to their welfare and health, thus contributing to the advancement of knowledge. Operational welfare score index and a “Quality of Life (QoL) scaling system” will form a suite of tools for welfare control of farmed fish, contributing to increase the knowledge of the effects that the farming conditions have on the welfare of fish, while being able to benchmark these effects against accepted best-practice industry standards and against other farms. A plethora of innovative disease prevention, monitoring, control and treatment approaches will be developed, including vaccines for five key fish pathogens; probiotics/phage treatments; nanoencapsulated antimicrobial peptides as feed additive against Gram-negative bacteria; passive immunization with recombinant antibodies; aptamers for use in diagnostic laboratories; qPCR on chip for non-invasive and non-mortal rapid diagnostics of pathogens in farms; integrated microfluidics platform for biology diagnostics of pathogens and immune markers, and fish bioprints for culturing difficult pathogens. These innovations will also help in reaching a healthier seafood production through improvement in farming practices, consequently contributing to increase of EU competitiveness. The latter will be also supported by development of a gamified operational farm economic model, and new biosecurity auditing and assessment protocols. Lastly, Cure4Aqua will improve the professional skills and competences of those working and being trained to work within the blue economy by organising state-of-the-art training courses on key subjects based on the sector’s needs, and lessons learned from Cure4Aqua. Education related partners will transfer project knowledge through their established institute courses, to undergraduate, post-graduate and vocational/part-time students to improve the competences of those being trained to work within the blue economy.
Cure4Aqua will push beyond the state of the art by: i) co-creating key success indicators to obtain metrics for assessing the progress achieved by Cure4Aqua; ii) concluding the first multiple-criteria decision-making diseases prioritization and develop the 1st Burden of Disease analysis to form comprehensive simulation models that can be used directly at the level of fish farm operations; iii) designing and optimizing a new approach (patholomics) that combines histopathology, dual transcriptomic and metagenomic data to characterize the disease entity; iv) using approach based on whole genome sequencing, transcriptomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and AI for strain selection, antigen identification and immunogenic epitope prediction to develop novel vaccines; v) identifying biomarkers, linking epigenetics (omics) and microbiome to rearing conditions, disease outbreaks and stress; vi) enriching live and commercial fish feeds with probiotics and anti-Vibrio and -Flavobacterium psychrophilum phages to allow stronger synergistic colonisation during the early fish rearing stage; vii) testing of the bactericidial activity of nanoencapsulated antimicrobial peptides under bacterial challenge; viii) applying a passive immunisation by a hagfish NNV-specific VLRB rAb as a proof of concept; ix) adapting a new monitoring systems for exterior skin/fin/eye/operculum conditions, and combining environmental data, growth data, physio-chemical parameters and behavioural indicators for predictive model using AI approaches; x) using non-invasive reproductive and stress hormone monitoring to monitor broodstock health and welfare; xi) using aptamers to develop new markers for pathogens and fish immune markers, developing bioprint-based culture and infection systems, and new dg. tools (high throughput flow-based multiplexing methods and qPCR on-chip); xii) bringing a range of scientific disciplines and socio-economic approaches to develop novel tools for assessing fish welfare.