Urgent work needed on new vaccines

Speaking at a National Office of Animal Health (NOAH) conference in London yesterday (Tuesday, February 15), animal health industry consultant Professor Andy Peters said with resistance to anti-parasitics rising and increasingly tight regulation on the use of antibiotics, the focus in the future needs to be on producing new vaccines.

He warned that with global trade and global warming increasing the threat of new emerging diseases, work had to be done now to ensure vets had all the tools in their armoury to combat disease and maintain productivity.

Progress in recent years has been slow, but Prof Peters said newer techniques such as recombinant DNA technology and genomics looked promising.

He said: “As technology and molecular biology advance we can bring to bear new scientific techniques to produce vaccines which we haven’t been able to produce successfully in the past

“If you look at North Africa there are already a number of DNA vaccines in use while in the US, a vaccine for Newcastle disease can be produced in Tobacco plants.

“We have not seen any consumer or activist reaction to the use of this technology in veterinary products so it looks promising at the moment.”

Small biotech firms would most likely be the source of these new products, he said, and in human medicine they had already overtaken big pharmaceutical companies in terms of new products being produced.

“Despite an increase in spend on R&D, the number of new products the big pharmaceutical firms have brought to the market has gone down.

“Instead, the development of new products is coming from small biotech companies and those are the companies which will produce the new molecules of the future and from which we will be looking to produce the vaccines we need.”

Prof Peters also called for more collaboration in researching new vaccines and bringing them to market, warning the private sector would not be able to make enough progress on its own.

He highlighted E. coli 0157 (the strain responsible for the 2009 outbreak at Godstone farm in Surrey) and pig salmonella as two diseases for which there is no commercial incentive for farmers to vaccinate.

In these cases, pharmaceutical firms are unlikely to invest in R&D, and he called for more public-private partnerships to look at bringing new vaccines onto the market.

Have your say

Please do not complete the following form field for security reasons.

Name

E-mail

Comment

Post as

Anonymously

Display name