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Towards the development of �a safe and sustainable vaccine against African Swine Fever

Guy Van den Eede

Ana Ruiz Moreno

Directorate “Health and Food”

DG Joint Research Centre

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26 April 2023

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This review of the research into African swine fever and its control looks at the progress made since 2015.

This report was commissioned by the STAR-IDAZ International Research Consortium in collaboration with the Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture USDA, ARS), and the Global African Swine Fever Research Alliance (GARA).

https://www.star-idaz.net/2022/03/2022-african-swine-fever-virus-research-review/

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Vaccine efforts: some considerations

  • The search for an ASF vaccine is not comparable to the development of a covid19 vaccine; compare it rather to searching for a vaccine against acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.
  • Although the virus is extremely complex, much progress is made to have a vaccine candidate; often of different type (live attenuated or other).
  • In November 2021, Russia’s deputy prime minister Victoria Abramchenko instructed the Russian Science and Education Ministry to start using the Russian ASF vaccine by 2024.

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The development, validation, and deployment of an effective, safe & sustainable ASF vaccine is of paramount importance.

  • There are vaccine candidates but their levels of efficiency and safety are largely unknown.
    • Oral or injectable?
    • Lack of a stable cell line that can effectively propagate ASFV without forcing adaptive changes in the viral genome;
    • The identification of protective antigens (PAs) has been described as “perhaps the single greatest ASFV research challenge”
    • Antibodies produced by infected animals do not fully neutralize the virus.
  • Requires a standardised pipeline for vaccine evaluation or side-by-side comparison.

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Approved vaccines in Vietnam. Success?

  • NAVET-ASFVAC vaccine, US-Vietnam partnership (USDA-ARS, NAVETCO)
    • 24 August 2022:�“Vietnam has temporarily suspended the use of its first home-grown African swine fever vaccine after dozens of pigs inoculated with the shots died this month”. (Reuters)
    • 27 September 2022:�“According to information received from MARD, it was determined that the deaths were caused by vaccination processes that were out of compliance with ministry guidelines,”

Stricter control of the vaccination process !!

  • AVAC vaccine, Vietnam
    • 1 February 2023:�“The efficacy rate of the AVAC vaccine, administered to pigs between the ages of 8 and 10 weeks, has been shown to reach 95%.”

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Suggestion: setup a “Pay-for-Results” partnership

Objective

Validate the protective efficacy of the most promising vaccines against the ASFV – Georgia strain in a double blind trial and advance those that achieve established performance criteria (“medium risk, medium success, and high impact”)

Step 1

Set up minimal acceptance criteria for candidate vaccines (WOAH)

Step 2

Agree on a number of performance criteria with respect to efficacy, safety & sustainability and launch a call and invest in a double blind validation study (in BSL3 facilities).

Step 3

Select a number of vaccines that have a commercialisation purpose based on cut-off criteria (safe, practical and useful).

Step 4

Scale up

Possible Partners (non)exhaustive): EC – US (USDA – Agricultural Research Service, US DHS Office of Health Security, Kansas State University for vaccine safety evaluation) – World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) – European Medicines Agency – European Food Safety Authority – Global African Swine Fever Research Alliance – EURL for ASF - EU Research Institutes - … plus private sector

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Medium term: Promote unfinished promising cutting-edge approaches that are high risk, low success, and high impact research.

  • Several EU laboratories report they have promising vaccines in the pipeline that are broader in scope than those described above.
  • Evaluate whether a promising vaccine (according to the performance criteria described above) can be produced within a short time frame

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Longer term: Promote cutting-edge approaches that are high risk, low success, and high impact research.

  • Focus on new synthetic biology and computational biology techniques aiming for rational vaccine development of epitope-based vaccines.
  • Use CRISPR/Cas technology to establish ASF-resistant pigs (legal constraints).
  • Given the risk of integration into the host genome associated with DNA vaccines, the potential of mRNA-based vaccine approach should be exploited.

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Thank you

© European Union 2023

Unless otherwise noted the reuse of this presentation is authorised under the CC BY 4.0 license. For any use or reproduction of elements that are not owned by the EU, permission may need to be sought directly from the respective right holders.

Slide xx: element concerned, source: e.g. Fotolia.com; Slide xx: element concerned, source: e.g. iStock.com

For any question, suggestion: guy.van-den-eede@ec.europa.eu