US-UK BBSRC-NIFA Collab. Swine Immune Toolkit: Development of new immune reagents for swine health, vaccine and disease studies

在英国和美国，猪被广泛作为食用动物饲养，并对两国经济做出了重大贡献。此外，它们在东南亚经济体中也越来越重要。然而，传染病仍然是养猪生产者面临的一个主要问题：最好的估计表明，仅在英国，每年约有1000万头猪被屠宰，仅猪流感的成本就可能在600万至1100万英镑之间。疫苗接种是控制传染病的一个关键因素，但可供猪使用的疫苗中，为整个接种人群提供坚实、持久保护的疫苗相对较少。此外，许多最重要的传染病已经进化出了避免正常免疫的方法。因此，了解免疫系统对自然感染和疫苗接种反应的基本机制，对于设计具有较长商业寿命的成功疫苗变得越来越重要。同样，猪被广泛用于人类疾病的生物医学研究，因为它们在生理、体型、遗传和免疫方面与人类非常接近。猪被用于研究的领域包括肥胖、心脏病和传染病。尽管它们很重要，尽管在开发研究猪免疫系统的工具和试剂方面已经工作了35年，但我们仍然远远落后于人类和小鼠的研究，因此我们无法研究一些新发现的免疫系统工作方式。在某些情况下，这是因为没有开发试剂，但在某些情况下，已经开发的试剂由于排他的商业协议而丢失，或者因为它们保存在一个地点，容易发生事故。我们建议找出可用试剂的空白，并填补最重要的。这将通过在世界范围内与猪一起工作的科学家进行游说来实现，我们已经开始了这一过程，并为我们提供了优先目标的初步清单。该项目将开发和验证这些试剂和其他确定的试剂，并根据非排他性协议共享和商业化它们，以确保它们的持续可用性。

Pigs are widely reared as food animals in the UK and the US and contribute significantly to both economies. In addition, they are increasingly important in south-east asian economies. However, infectious disease is still a major problem for pig producers: best estimates suggest that the annual costs of swine influenza alone might be between £6-11M from an estimated 10 million pigs to slaughter in the UK alone. Vaccination is a key element in controlling infectious diseases, but relatively few of the vaccines available for pigs provide solid, long-lasting protection for the whole of the vaccinated population. In addition, many of the most important infectious diseases have evolved ways of avoiding normal immunity. Increasingly, therefore, understanding the fundamental mechanisms involved in the immune response to natural infection and to vaccination is becoming important for designing successful vaccines with long commercial lifespans. Similarly, pigs are widely used in biomedical research on human diseases, since they are very close to humans in physiology, size, genetics and immunity. Areas in which pigs are used in research include obesity, heart disease, and infectious diseases.Despite their importance, and despite work over 35 years on developing the tools and reagents to study the pig immune system, we are still a long way behind research in humans and mice, such that we are unable to study some of the newly identified ways in which the immune system works. In some cases this has been because reagents have not been developed, but in some cases the reagents which have been developed have been lost through exclusive commercial agreements or because they were held in a single site and vulnerable to accidents. We propose to identify the gaps in the available reagents and to fill the most important. This will be achieved by canvassing scientists working with pigs worldwide, a process which we have already begun and which has provided us with an initial list of priority targets. The project will develop and validate these reagents and others identified, and share and commercialise them under non-exclusive agreements in order to ensure their continued availability.