THE CHALLENGE OF DEVELOPING NEW GENERATION VACCINES FOR CONTROL AND ERADICATION OF FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE IN SOUTH AMERICA

Foot and mouth disease (FMD) is a highly infectious viral disease that affects food producing animals such as cattle, pigs and sheep. The FMD status given by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) has a huge financial impact on countries that have economies based on meat trade. In the past 15 years the MERCOSUR countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) have consolidated industrial processes to supply the region with safe and efficacious vaccines to prevent FMD in livestock. Control and eradication programs rely heavily on compulsory vaccination with multivalent whole virus inactivated vaccines. Currently, vaccines are industrially obtained by infection of large volumes of BHK suspension cell cultures, purification and virus inactivation. Manufacturing requires operation under BSL3A biosecurity facilities and the processing of large volumes of several different strains of live infectious virus. Despite numerous international efforts to develop new generation vaccines, none of these vaccines have reached the market yet. Recently, an European Union - MERCOSUR funded program to promote the creation of academia-industry research consortia that focus in using biotechnology to solve critical regional problems has been put in place. In this presentation the work that is being carried out by the “Biotecsur Aftosa” research consortium will be discussed