Moving African swine fever (ASF) vaccines from lab to field

African swine fever (ASF), a category A disease listed in Article 5 of the EU Animal Health Law (Regulation (EU) 2016/429), has recently transformed from an exotic disease to a panzootic threat to domestic and wild suids world-wide. The socio-economic impact is huge and can be felt not only in the farming sector, but also in distantly related industries, such as the production of biomedical agents derived from pigs, or even sweets. It is therefore not surprising that ASF is also a STAR-IDAZ high-priority topic.

Although traditional control mechanisms are effective in conventional housing systems for domestic pigs, they quickly reach their limits in wild animals. Vaccination would therefore be of great importance. In Europe, this could be considered for wild boar in particular, but also for other endangered pig species worldwide and could therefore also contribute to the preservation of biodiversity. Great successes have been achieved with oral vaccines, for example in the fight against classical swine fever.

We are convinced that the time is ripe to leave the mere realm of basic research and proof-of-concept studies and to conduct the studies that would be necessary for central approval of our most promising vaccine candidates by the EMA. For this purpose, the ASFaVIP consortium has selected three vaccine candidates that, in the best-case scenario, could be used for both oral immunization in wild boar as well as parenteral vaccination in domestic pigs.