a nearly 100 percent death rate in newborn piglets.
Though two commercially accessible vaccinations against PEDV are available, none is effective at preventing the illness. Mike Zhang, the project’s primary investigator and a professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering and Turner Faculty Fellow, recognized the importance of developing an effective vaccination against this virus.
Using the four-year, $630,000 fund support awarded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Zhang and his co-investigator X.J. Meng, who is a University Distinguished Professor of molecular virology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, are developing a vaccine based on nanoparticles to combat this highly infectious coronavirus in pigs. Due to the coronavirus family affiliation of PEDV, the researchers expect to obtain information and insight in order to rapidly develop vaccines against human coronaviruses and their different strains.
According to Zhang, “This project will give us the opportunity not only to develop a vaccine for swine, but gain insight into coronaviruses”. He added, “While the viruses are different from each other, they share a lot of similarities. A lot of things that we learn from this project can be used to develop vaccines against human coronaviruses in the future.” Zhang spoke about the PEDV. He said, “PEDV is one of the most devastating illnesses in the swine industry. Right now, we don’t have a good mitigation method. We want a safe and reliable tool in the arsenal of those in industry and our research will lead to that.”
Vaccine development has focused on developing a safer, more efficacious method of delivering an immune response during the recent years. Thus far, that goal has been set on nanoparticle-based vaccinations, which are capable of safely injecting a robust immune response in subjects in order to protect them against illness.
Zhang detailed the role of nanoparticles in the project. He said, “Once you decorate the nanoparticle with viral proteins, the nanoparticle looks like a virus particle. Once you give that to the animal, it can have a very strong immune response toward the viral proteins on the nanoparticle to protect the vaccinated animals from the invading virus.”
Once administered to the individual, the immune response can persist for an extended period of time with the nanoparticle platform. The initial dose may last up to six months, with a booster shot required to conclude the vaccination series, which is an usual approach for vaccines delivered via a variety of different delivery platforms.
According to Zhang, “If we formulate the nanoparticle well, the immunity the vaccine can provide protection for is around half a year. But we have not tested beyond that duration using the nanoparticle delivery platform. It’s an extremely important subject to tackle. This is a good duration to target because a body really doesn’t need a lot of antibodies circulating to provide a good immune response.” USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, AFRI project (#2021-08581), is sponsoring this investigation.
