Objective
Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a viral infection of cloven-hoofed animals currently endemic in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and S. America. Success of vaccination has prompted the EU to adopt a total stamping-out policy since 1991.
As a consequence, a fully susceptible farm animal population prevails at present in the EU countries, potentially threatened by border countries where the disease is enzootic. The disease currently presents a constant threat to Europe, as witnessed over the last 12 months in the Balkans, with the outbreaks in Italy (1993) and Greece (1994) supporting this concern about disease re-introduction into Europe.
Of particular relevance in this context is consideration of excretion rates of the virus by infected animals, which can occur before clinical diagnosis is possible.
The policy for controlling outbreaks is a zonal slaughtering in the contaminated area, concomitant with a ring quarantine and surveillance around the outbreak site. If this system proves inadequate, a vaccination campaign is effected. Of particular benefit to the control measures would be an effective emergency vaccination scheme, which would ensure the rapid development of early protection.
It is in this direction that the current project is designed. The basic objective of the current proposal is to identify the potential for an emergency vaccination scheme wherein a rapid induction of early protection against FMD could be effected. Towards this end, it is essential to investigate the characteristics of the early immune response against FMDV, induced by vaccination, which would result in efficient and particularly rapid protection against the disease.
Therein, the targets of the planned research and development would be
(i) investigate the kinetics of induction of protection, with special emphasis on rapid induction of early protection;
(ii) determine the influence of the route of immunization (aerosol form a contact infected animal, snout inoculation, intranasal) on the outcome of the attempted vaccine-induced protection;
(iii) characterize the effector compartments within the early immune response against FMDV following vaccination;
(iv) investigate the potential for different forms of the FMDV vaccine (different vaccine formulations and different FMDV immunogens), with respect to inducing early protection with longevity of response;
(v) determine the applicability of tools such as synthetic peptides and monoclonal antibodies to the identification of effective immune responses early after vaccination;
(vi) improve surveillance and epidemiological procedures for FMDV identification and characterization, through the incorporation of new molecular biology approaches to the diagnosis and characterization of FMDV field strains;
(vii) compare the relative roles of the effector responses involved early in comparison to late after vaccination (that is, early protection compared with longevity of immunity).
In order to effect this work, it is proposed to concentrate on the porcine response as both a model and of direct consequence to animal health in this area. Therein, the experimental design and rational can be summarized as a study of the early immunological defences induced by FMDV vaccines, containing different forms of the immunogen and different formulations. Both the innate and specific immune responses will be identified, in terms of their efficacy at defending against FMDV, and their duration. The characteristics of the specific response will be made in terms of the epitopes recognized. These latter analyses will help define the response developing, and in association with the innate response analyses, determine characteristics of the immune response which could be employed as determinants of an effective vaccination with respect to the induction of early protection with a minimum longevity.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunologyimmunisation
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologyvirology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomolecules
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugsvaccines
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmolecular biology
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
28130 VALDEOLMOS - MADRID
Spain