Abstract
Classical approaches to African swine fever virus (ASFV) vaccine development have not been successful; inactivated virus does not provide protection and use of live attenuated viruses generated by passage in tissue culture had a poor safety profile. Current African swine fever (ASF) vaccine research focuses on the development of modified live viruses by targeted gene deletion or subunit vaccines. The latter approach would be differentiation of vaccinated from infected animals (DIVA)-compliant, but information on which viral proteins to include in a subunit vaccine is lacking. Our previous work used DNA-prime/vaccinia-virus boost to screen 40 ASFV genes for immunogenicity, however this immunization regime did not protect animals after challenge. Here we describe the induction of both antigen and ASFV-specific antibody and cellular immune responses by different viral-vectored pools of antigens selected based on their immunogenicity in pigs. Immunization with one of these pools, comprising eight viral-vectored ASFV genes, protected 100% of pigs from fatal disease after challenge with a normally lethal dose of virulent ASFV. This data provide the basis for the further development of a subunit vaccine against this devastating disease.
Highlights
African swine fever virus (ASFV) is the etiological agent of a disease of domestic pigs and wild boar that is typically fatal and for which there is no vaccine or prophylactic
In experiment 1 two groups of six outbred pigs were primed with two separate pools of eight replication-deficient human adenovirus 5 vectors expressing individual ASFV genes and another group of six pigs was immunized with rAd expressing the influenza virus nucleoprotein as a control
The animals were boosted with the same pools of antigens vectored using rAd or modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA)
Summary
African swine fever virus (ASFV) is the etiological agent of a disease of domestic pigs and wild boar that is typically fatal and for which there is no vaccine or prophylactic. The disease was first reported in the early 20th century and is considered endemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Experiments showed that passage of the virus through tissue culture led to its attenuation and that pigs immunized with these attenuated viruses were protected from acute disease after challenge with homologous strains. Such attenuated viruses were used in the Iberian Peninsula in the early 1960s, Vaccines 2020, 8, 234; doi:10.3390/vaccines8020234 www.mdpi.com/journal/vaccines. Vaccines 2020, 8, 234 their efficacy in the field was not satisfactory and induced a chronic form of the disease [1,2,3].
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