Farmscape for July 2, 2020

The Director and CEO of VIDO-InterVac says the use of a virus that's harmless to pigs as a mechanism to deliver the proteins that will trigger an immune response to African Swine Fever is the safest available approach to the development of vaccines to protect the Canadian swine herd from the infection.
While researchers around the world are using various techniques to develop vaccines to protect pigs from African Swine Fever, the approach being used by VIDO-InterVac involves inserting specific proteins from African Swine Fever into another harmless virus for delivery as a vaccine.
VIDO-InterVac Director and CEO Dr. Volker Gerdts says there is good indication that adenoviral vectors are potent and may work to prevent African Swine Fever.

Clip-Dr. Volker Gerdts-Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization:
Using an adenovirus as a vector offers the advantage that you don't have to actually use the virus, the African Swine Fever virus.
Everything we do is working the adenoviral vector and so we're not really including, at any step, the African Swine Fever virus in this process.
That is very important from a biosecurity point of view to ensure that our Canadian swine herd is safe and that we're not by accident introducing the virus into the herd.
The opposite is true for these live attenuated vaccines, these gene deletion mutants that are being tested right now.
They are essentially an attenuated form of the virus, still a live African Swine Fever that is just not as disease causing as the wild type would be but there is always the chance or the risk that they may revert back.
We, as a country, really don't want to have these gene deletion mutants here in Canada.
We never want to have virus in our country, in our herd so using the adenoviral vector as a vaccine platform has many many advantages over other technologies.

Dr. Gerdts says this approach allows you to stimulate an immune response but you won't have any clinical disease or other complications.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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