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

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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.