{"id":193236,"date":"2022-12-20T07:30:28","date_gmt":"2022-12-20T12:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=193236"},"modified":"2022-12-23T09:50:02","modified_gmt":"2022-12-23T14:50:02","slug":"uconn-collaborates-with-usda-to-develop-african-swine-fever-vaccine-candidate-licensed-by-zoetis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2022\/12\/uconn-collaborates-with-usda-to-develop-african-swine-fever-vaccine-candidate-licensed-by-zoetis\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Collaborates With USDA To Develop African Swine Fever Vaccine Candidate Licensed by Zoetis"},"content":{"rendered":"

African swine fever (ASF), a virus that rapidly infects domestic and wild pigs, can decimate pork-producing economies. In one year, the disease walloped China with a loss equivalent to one percent of its GDP.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In response to the virus\u2019s spread from its origins in sub-Saharan Africa to other continents, scientists at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and UConn have developed vaccine candidates deemed \u201cpromising\u201d by independent researchers. The vaccine candidate ASFV-G-<\/span>\u0394<\/span>MGF was one of those candidates and was recently licensed for commercial development by Zoetis, an offshoot of the medical company Pfizer and the world\u2019s largest animal pharmaceutical producer.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

UConn\u2019s <\/span>Technology Commercialization Services (TCS)<\/span><\/a> worked with the USDA to facilitate an agreement that allowed the USDA to negotiate licenses with animal health companies like Zoetis who can eventually bring this vaccine to the market. TCS works with faculty and researchers to expedite and facilitate the transformation of UConn discoveries into products and services that benefit society.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Guillermo Risatti, professor of pathobiology<\/a> in UConn\u2019s College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and director of the <\/span>Connecticut Veterinary Medical <\/span><\/a>Diagnostic <\/a>Laboratory (CVMDL), is enthusiastic about the vaccine candidate\u2019s potential. CVMDL is one of UConn Extension’s active service centers working cooperatively with federal and state veterinary agencies to enhance disease surveillance and response<\/span> in the region.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Over the years, people have tried live attenuated vaccines, they have tried killed vaccines, they have tried different cocktails of proteins that are expressed by the virus as a mechanism of protection,\u201d Risatti says. \u201cBut it never materialized into some sort of candidate.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Risatti, collaborating with USDA scientists Dr. Manuel Borca and Douglas Gladue, developed this vaccine candidate. The successful development of safe and effective modified live vaccines represents a new frontier in protecting swine from ASF.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Researchers from Zoetis and the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI) in Germany have conducted trials on wild boars using edible bait containing the vaccine, and on domestic pigs through a more traditional route\u2014injection into the muscle. Both routes demonstrated the immunization\u2019s efficacy against ASF.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOverall, our findings confirm that \u2018ASF-G-\u0394MGF\u2019 is a most promising vaccine candidate that could find its way into well-organized and controlled immunization campaigns,\u201d the researchers from Zoetis and FLI write in a peer-reviewed article in the journal Pathogens.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Currently, the nearest documented cases of ASF (respective to the United States) have occurred in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. But oceans don\u2019t always pose barriers for foreign animal disease spread\u2014this was evident earlier in 2022, when UConn CVDML researchers detected a <\/span>foreign rabbit pathogen<\/span><\/a> that had reached Connecticut for the first time.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

ASF emerged in sub-Saharan Africa after European colonists brought their own pigs to the continent, according to Risatti. This puts the emergence of ASF about 200-300 years in the past. Like all viruses, though, it mutates and persists. More than\u00a035 countries are now impacted by the disease, including China, the world\u2019s largest pork producer.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat is a major problem when you don\u2019t have a vaccine or ways to control the spread of the disease. You will rely only on trying to slow down the movement of animals, but that\u2019s very difficult. Animals are constantly being moved to market or formally or informally from one neighbor to another, and that\u2019s when you see these diseases spreading very fast,\u201d Risatti says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the world\u2019s largest animal health companies non-exclusively licensed the USDA and UConn\u2019s jointly owned vaccine candidate for African swine fever, a lethal disease in pigs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":175,"featured_media":112829,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2224,2304,2302,2076,2364,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2413],"class_list":["post-193236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cahnr","category-extension","category-pathobiology-veterinary-science","category-research","category-technology-commercialization","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-12 13:57:13","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193236"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":193763,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193236\/revisions\/193763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/112829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193236"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=193236"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=193236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}