Urgent issues that need to be resolved:
African Swine Fever (ASF) is one of the most dangerous infectious diseases in pigs with rapid spread and a mortality rate of up to 100%. In February 2019, ASF appeared in two northern provinces of Vietnam, then spread throughout the country, causing millions of pigs to be culled, causing great economic losses to farmers, increasing pork prices, and causing serious economic losses to farmers. Regenerating the pig herd faces many difficulties.
The disease is caused by African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV). ASFV is a virus consisting of three shells outside a central core containing a very large genome encoding about 160 proteins that serve to infect and inhibit the virus’s host cells. Due to the complex nature of ASFV, there is currently no vaccine to prevent ASFV in the world. Research and development of vaccines to prevent ASF is a very urgent requirement today.
Novelty of the project:
To date, a number of studies around the world developing traditional vaccines to prevent ASF, such as inactivated vaccines, have been shown to not provide high protection effectiveness. Therefore, recombinant expression of some ASFV antigens responsible for stimulating the immune response is considered the key to developing new generation vaccines to effectively prevent ASF.
The direction of producing subunit vaccines using the expression system in plants has many advantages such as safety, simple process, easy to increase production scale, short production time, low product cost, etc. Therefore, this is a direction that is being commercially developed in many countries such as Canada, Japan, the United States, etc. and has also been effectively researched at the Institute of Biotechnology (VAST). However, there is no publication in the world and Vietnam on the production of subunit vaccines to prevent ASF of plant origin. Therefore, this project has been proposed to be implemented at the present time.
Project objective:
Research the scientific and experimental basis of producing recombinant antigens capable of creating antibodies that neutralize the virus that causes African swine fever.
