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Farm-Scape, Episode 1333

Scientists at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization are confident they can speed up and extend the effectiveness of vaccines by combining various technologies. Researchers at VIDO are working on several technologies, ranging from DNA vaccines which target specific organisms to new compounds designed to enhance the effectiveness of orally delivered vaccines.

Immunology Program Manager Dr. Philip Griebel says duration of immunity has been a limitation with many of these vaccines and researchers hope they can overcome that by combining these technologies.

"What we will be working on over the next two to three years is seeing if we can bring together some of the traditional types of vaccines, what are called protein based vaccines.

If we can bring that together with the DNA vaccine and through some of these novel formulations that we're exploring at the moment...if we can find a way to develop vaccines which will induce very fast immunity.

That has been a problem with the DNA vaccines.

They do work well but they often take three to four weeks to induce a protective response where as there's many situations such as in the face of a disease outbreak where you may want to induce very rapid immunity in animals, in a matter of days or a week.

We're exploring some of these technologies to see if we can combine different forms of vaccine to induce very rapid immunity but also very long disease protection. That has been a real limitation with many of the present vaccines.

The vaccines may only protect animals for a three to six month period whereas often the period of disease risk may be much longer throughout their life."

Dr. Griebel says hopefully, by achieving much longer duration of immune protection, the number of vaccinations that will need to be used during the life of an animal can be reduced.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.