Improvement of Diagnostic and Vaccine Tools for Emerging and Re-emerging Animal Health Threats

Vaccination has proved to be the best preventive measure against infectious diseases. Despite all the successes there are a number of limitations to the currently practised approaches. In veterinary medicine the application of vaccines by injection limits their use?for small ruminants? in rural areas . This practice requires well trained staff taking care to keep utmost hygiene and maintain a cold chain for the vaccines. Additionally injected vaccines do rarely induce production of specific mucosal?antibodies (IgA)?covering the mucosal tissues in nose, mouth and lungs?which scavenge bacteria or viruses before they can enter the body.? Such IgA antibodies can efficiently be induces by "mucosal" vaccines, i.e. formulations which are applied to the nose, mouth or eyes. Such vaccines and specifically the eye drop vaccines have the big advantage that you need only small volumes, application can be done by village vaccinators and the cool chain will be much easier to maintain. Recent experiments formulating such mucosal vaccines for ruminants presented a number of challenges namely too?low viscosity leading to spills, unsuitable components for freeze drying or the process of formulating the components appropriately. Additionally the measurement of IgA is still done by a "research tool" and?existing general laboratory tools have to be adapted to allow their measurement in standard laboratories. ?
The expected outcome of this CRP is the ?development of a number of different mucosal vaccine formulations?against viral diseases like PPR or influenza or against bacterial diseases like Mycoplasmas or Pasteurella. In parallel the tools to measure specific IgA induced in the mucosals ?will be developed and applied. Experimental combinations of live attenuated viruses together with killed bacterial preparations will be tested to evaluate an enhancing effect of such combinations.
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