Location: Foreign Animal Disease Research
Project Number: 3022-32000-063-032-T
Project Type: Trust Fund Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jan 30, 2022
End Date: Jan 29, 2024
Objective:
African swine fever virus (ASFV) is a significant threat to agriculture in the United States. There are currently no commercial vaccines available to protect pigs against infection with ASFV and disease can result in devastating losses with up to 100% mortality. Of special concern is the highly pathogenic Georgia isolate, which is currently causing the current outbreaks allacross Asia and Eastern Europe. ARS, Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) has recently discovered several new experimental live-attenuated vaccine candidates, of which ASFV-G-delta I177L is the best candidate. To increase the safety profile of this vaccine candidate additional genomic deletions will be added.
Specific objectives are:
1. Characterize immune sera from swine that have been vaccinated using experimental ASFV live-attenuated vaccines and were protected against the challenge with a virulent ASFV strain.
2. Develop a differntaited infectived from vaccinated animal (DIVA) marker live attenuated virus by deleting one of the genes identified in Goal 1 into ASFv-G-delta-I177L vaccine platform.
Approach:
Using cells transfected with these plasmids, we will use the immune serum to identify which ASFV proteins are reactive indicating which proteins produce an immune response in our Live-attenuated ASFV vaccines. The proteins identified will be targets for subunit vaccines in future projects.
