The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization reports the development of a vaccine administered with semen into the uterus to protect sows and their piglets from PED continues to move forward. The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization has developed the first intrauterine vaccines to protect sows and their offspring from Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea and, over the next year, researchers will be assessing various formulations to determine which provide the most protection.
Dr. Heather Wilson, a research scientist with VIDO, says needle-free vaccination through the uterus offers several advantages.
Clip-Dr. Heather Wilson-Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization:
We're still very much in the preliminary research-based phases but we're making some good advances. We're learning which formulations work better and we're improving that every time. Ideally, we would want to administer the vaccine only once so that a gilt, the pig who's never been bred before, if we administer a single doe into the uterus, then she would be protected and her piglets would be protected.
Right now, we need a few doses so she's not protected in the first pregnancy but she is with the second dose and the second pregnancy and we need to keep improving that so that we have a single dose protective vaccine.
Over the next year or so we are going to administer the vaccine with many different nanoparticle formulations to see which vaccine formulations are the most protective. Especially we'll actually look at what's protective to the gilt and the sow as well as what gets passed along into the colostrum to protect the piglets. So, there's kind of two things we have to focus on, the sow and the passive protection to the piglets.