The Department of Agriculture (DA) said it will ask England-based Pirbright Institute to include the Philippines in the clinical trials of its African swine fever (ASF) vaccine.
Agriculture Secretary William D. Dar said they will formally communicate with Pirbright Institute, through the country’s agricultural attache overseeing United Kingdom, to express the country’s intention to join the research organization’s ASF vaccine clinical trials.
The Pirbright Institute announced last week that pigs immunized with an ASF vaccine created by its scientists provided 100 percent protection against the fatal hog disease.
“We are communicating with them if it is possible to include the Philippines in their trial so we can see the efficacy of the vaccine. This is a welcome development and this will really help to control the spread of the African swine fever virus,” Dar told reporters in a phone patch interview on Monday.
Dar disclosed that the DA is willing to spend money to purchase the ASF vaccines once these are proven effective and commercialized.
“That is a better investment than what we are doing right now. Our local hog industry will benefit more because there is a control already—there is a vaccine against African swine fever,” he said.
ASF disease has caused the depopulation of over 250,000 hogs in the country, or about 2.2 percent, of total pig population since the presence of the disease was confirmed in September 2019.
The agriculture chief said hog raisers may raise their investments and new players could venture into the industry if the vaccine is proven effective and commercialized. “A lot will return in the hog industry and invest more. We can recover in the next six to seven months if the ASF vaccines yield good results,” Dar added.
In a news statement last week, Pirbright Institute said its team has developed a “vectored vaccine, which uses a non-harmful virus [the vector] to deliver eight strategically selected genes from the ASF virus [ASFV] genome into pig cells.”
“Once inside the cell, the genes produce viral proteins, which prime the pig immune cells to respond to an ASF infection,” the Pirbright Institute said.
“All pigs that were immunized with the vaccine were protected from severe disease after challenge with an otherwise fatal strain of ASFV, although some clinical signs of disease did develop,” it added.
Pirbright Institute said this type of vaccine enables the differentiation of ASF-infected animals from those that have received the vaccine. The research organization added that this allows “vaccination programs to be established without sacrificing the ability to trade.”
“Our next step will be to uncover the mechanisms behind how the proteins produced by the virus genes stimulate the immune system so we can refine and add to those included in the vaccine to improve effectiveness,” Dr. Chris Netherton, head of Pirbright’s ASF Vaccinology Group, said.
The Pirbright Institute is a World Organisation for Animal Health reference laboratory for ASF. The DA tapped the Pirbright Institute for confirmatory tests for its ASF cases last year.
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May I know the latest development on this?