Research Gaps
Protective Immunology
- Assays to measure immune responses to vaccines
- Indicators of innate immune system resistance
- Identification of protective antigens, duration of immunity and immune evasion
- Identifying conserved T and B cell epitopes for broad specificity vaccines
- Relationship between immune gene expression and protein expression/function
- Reliable biomarkers to predict vaccine success/failure without need to use animal challenge studies
- Lack of simple in vitro correlates of protection that accurately predict vaccination outcome in terms of protection
- Induce protective immunity with minimal doses using non-live vaccines
- Lack of knowledge about protective immune responses in the host species for some pathogens, especially “exotics” and its stimulation
Vaccine Efficacy
- Antigenic diversity
- Maternal antibodies
- Improving vaccine efficacy in neonatal period and inducing long term immunity
- Food chain transfer to people
- Kinetics of the live vaccines
- The persistence of live vaccines in various tissues
- How multivalent or multiple vaccine approaches may impact on one another
- Mechanisms of competition between recombinant vaccines
- Increasing the efficacy of subunit vaccines
- Pre-natal and early neo-natal approaches
- Biomarkers that predict vaccine efficacy for more complex diseases
- How different types of vaccines work for livestock
Vaccines and duration of Immunity
- Induction of immunity with longer duration
- Lifelong immunity
- Single vaccination
- Distinguishing between vaccinated and naturally infected animals (DIVA).
- Disease eradication with reduction in the wildlife reservoir
Host, pathogen and their interactions
- At the site of infection
- Host responses to infection, particularly to intracellular pathogens.
- Microbial pathogenicity: molecular mechanisms of cell surface attachment, immune evasion, immunomodulation etc.
- Pathogen-host interactions at whole animal level
- Effectiveness of vaccines in production environments (opposed to ideal conditions in laboratories)
- Post genome analysis of pathogens
- Host-Pathogen interaction when animals are “partially protected” after vaccination with live vaccines.
- Different life cycle stages of many parasites and protective immunity induction
Mucosal Immunity
- Responses, in particular T cell memory, at mucosal sites of infection
- Lack of reliable methods to induce mucosal immune responses following immunization with inert antigens
- Mucosal T cell responses in ruminants (e.g for TB and paraTB)
- Development of efficacious oral vaccines based on better understanding of mucosal immunity
- Mucosal vaccination systems
Continuous development of vaccines to meet future challenges
- Emerging and rapidly changing pathogens: Identifying the highest risks and trying to develop appropriate interventions (vaccines)
- Rapid high throughput production of novel vaccines
- Broader immunity against huge diversity of constantly emerging/re-emerging pathogens
- Continuous vaccine matching studies to evaluate the effectiveness and potency of the current vaccine
- Evolution of virulence (driven by the partially effective vaccines)
- Multivalent vaccines for disease syndromes
- The ability of the live vaccines to revert to virulent for/recombinants/point mutations
- Produce effective vaccines against pathogens where antibodies have been shown not to be protective against the natural infection
- Impact of vaccination on the commensal microbiota
- Mechanisms to enhance immunogenicity of live oral vaccines and decrease the variability seen in protection
- Rational based vaccine design
Vaccine responsiveness
- Genetic variation in responsiveness to vaccines; the potential for combined genetic selection and vaccination strategies
- Immunological memory in veterinary species
- Immunological basis for vaccine failure
- Concurrent infection or heterologous vaccination may influence the response to vaccination
- Role of genetics in animals which are poor immunological responders and are therefore potential “index” cases