Project description
The growing threat of African swine fever
African swine fever (ASF) has swiftly transitioned from an exotic malady to a global menace for domestic and wild suids (including pigs, hogs, boars, and wild boars). Europe grapples with varying scenarios of ASF, from sporadic introductions to widespread epidemics, particularly challenging in wild boar and backyard farm settings. Conventional control methods are effective in industrial pig farms but falter in containing the disease in wild populations or smaller farms. In this context, the EU-funded ASFaVIP project aims to address this gap by testing promising vaccines, including ASFV-G-ΔI177L, which has shown efficacy in Vietnam. Safety and efficacy tests, alongside immune response characterisation and optimisation of vaccination strategies, will be conducted. This data is crucial for assessing the benefits and risks of deploying ASF vaccines.
Objective
"African swine fever (ASF) has recently transformed from an exotic disease to a panzootic threat to domestic and wild suids world-wide. Europe is currently facing different scenarios with front and point introductions, affected wild boar and domestic pig populations, epidemic and endemic situations. While our traditional prevention and control strategies work well with industrial pig farms, we quickly reach our limits when we have to control the disease in the abundant wild boar population or in regions with a majority of backyard farms. To turn the tide and to safeguard animal health, vaccines, especially oral vaccines for wild boar, could be the missing tool.
There has been considerable progress in vaccine development and while we should continue to look for alternative approaches, we must now also dare to test the promising candidates beyond simple proof-of-concept studies. Only in this way can we generate the data base for benefit-risk analysis of whether and how current generation vaccines could be employed.
Along these lines, this project sets out to test the vaccine candidate ""ASFV-G-ΔI177L"" in safety and efficacy tests after oral and intramuscular application as prescribed by international guidelines. This vaccine candidate has shown safety and very good protection under laboratory conditions and has been applied in the field in Vietnam. As a backup option, other promising candidates, “ASFV-G-ΔMGF” and “ASFV-G-Δ9GL/UK, will be tested in initial comparative trials. Accompanying the prescribed tests, our interdisciplinary consortium will characterize the protective immune responses, target the optimization of oral immunization and model tailored vaccination strategies. The data body generated in this project is crucial for benefit-risk-assessments at the level of all authorities entrusted with licensure and deployment of ASF vaccines and for this reason, relevant stakeholders will be involved from the start to guarantee full exploitation of our data."
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
17493 Greifswald-Insel Riems
Germany