Scientists Explore Novel Approach to Protecting Piglets from PED

Researchers with PlantForm Corporation and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada are exploring the potential of a novel approach to protect piglets from Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea through their mother's colostrum.PlantForm Corporation and the London Research and Development Centre, with funding from Swine Innovation Porc, are developing oral vaccines that, when fed as a top dressing to the sow, will trigger an immune response to PED.

PlantForm Vice President Research Dr. Doug Cossar says the goal is to deliver virus-like compounds through the sow's feed that her immune system will recognise and respond to and then share that immunity with her piglets through her colostrum.

Quote-Dr. Doug Cossar-PlantForm Corporation:

The immune system is tuned, if you like, to seeing particles.Viruses are very small particles, somewhere less than 100 nanometers in size.The immune system will recognise that on a variety of levels as being something which is foreign and try to attack it so we're trying to develop particulate vaccines.

They're vaccines which present the antigenic components of the virus but on a particle which again is about 100 nanometers in size.What we're doing is taking two approaches to this.There's ourselves at PlantForm who are developing what's called virus-like particles which essentially look and feel like viruses but they have no DNA or no nucleic acid in them so they're not infectious but they look and feel to the immune system like virus.

Dr. Rima Menassa from the London AAFC facility is working on protein scaffolds.These are proteins which naturally form aggregates, so about the same sort of size and what you do is you graft onto that what you believe to be the antigenic part of the target virus and so we're going to try and develop two ways to approach this problem to give us a better chance of success.

Dr. Cossar says delivering these compounds through the feed would eliminate the costs associated with purifying the vaccine and vaccination.He says, if successful, this approach can be applied to other species and to other infectious diseases.