Safer foot-and-mouth vaccine developed

Researchers from Diamond Light Source and The Pirbright Institute have developed a safer vaccine for the foot-and-mouth-disease virus (FMDV).

The vaccine is synthetic, made up of tiny protein shells designed to trigger optimum immune response. It doesn’t rely on growing live infectious virus so is much safer to produce than the conventional vaccine.

“Foot and mouth disease is one of the most economically important diseases in livestock worldwide and is particularly prevalent in the developing world – endemic in central Africa and some parts of the Middle East and Asia. Approximately 3  billion doses of vaccine are administered every year but it is globally undersupplied due to the high cost of development. Alleviating the disease will alleviate poverty and that’s where I think the new vaccine will have the most impact,” Dr Bryan Charleston, Head of Livestock Viral Diseases Programme at the Pirbright Institute, the world reference laboratory for tracking FMD spread, told Laboratory News.

The researchers used Diamond’s visualisation capabilities -where extremely intense  beams of synchrotron light are generated- which enabled them to see something a billion times smaller than a pinhead and further enhance the design  atom by atom of the empty virus shells.

[caption id="attachment_32566" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="3D image of the Diamond synchrotron - Copyright: Diamond Light Source"][/caption]

Professor David Stuart, Life Science Director at Diamond Light Source and MRC Professor of Structural Biology at the Department of Medicine University of Oxford told Laboratory News: “I’ve been interested in foot and mouth disease and the virus’ structure since the 2001 outbreak. This led groupings of people from across the globe to get together and work out how to make a better vaccine. Instead of producing a whole, live virus, we take the part that produces its coat. Unlike the traditional vaccines, there is no chance that the empty shell vaccine could revert to its infectious form.”

The absence of viral proteins from the vaccine will also allow diagnostic tests to be further refined to demonstrate the absence of infection in vaccinated animals with greater confidence.

These empty virus shells have been engineered to be more stable which makes the vaccine much easier to store and reduces costs. Pre-clinical trials have shown the vaccine to be stable at temperatures up to 56°C for at least two hours, whereas the traditional vaccine has to be produced and stored in a chilled and stable environment.

Clinical trials of the synthetic shell based vaccine on cattle were carried out by Dr Bryan Charleston, Head of Livestock Viral Diseases Programme at The Pirbright Institute. The results of the trail are published in PLOS Pathogens and suggest that this vaccine is as effective as current vaccines.

[caption id="attachment_32567" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Structure of foot-and-mouth disease virus - Copyright: The Pirbright Institute"][/caption]

“We hope that a broad range of research groups working on vaccine development for viruses related to foot-and-mouth disease will be interested in taking our discovery forward to help tackle other major global disease challenges,” said Charleston.