Category Archives: Biotechnology

African cattle to be protected from killer disease

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ITM Vaccine

Millions of African families could be saved from destitution thanks to a much-needed vaccine that is being mass-produced in a drive to protect cattle against a deadly parasite.

East Coast fever is a tick-transmitted disease that kills one cow every 30 seconds – with one million a year dying of the disease.

Calves are particularly susceptible to the disease. In herds kept by the pastoral Maasai people, for example, the disease kills from 20 to over 50 per cent of all unvaccinated calves. This makes it difficult and often impossible for the herders to plan for the future, to improve their livestock enterprises and thus to raise their standard of living.

An experimental vaccine against East Coast fever was first developed more than 30 years ago. This has been followed by work to allow the vaccine to be produced on a large scale, with major funding from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and others.

East Coast Fever puts the lives of more than 25 million cattle at risk in the 11 countries where the disease is now endemic, and endangers a further 10 million animals in new regions such as southern Sudan, where the disease has been spreading at a rate of more than 30 kilometres a year. The vaccine could save the 11 affected countries at least £175 million a year.

The immunization procedure – called “infection-and-treatment” because the animals are infected with whole parasites while being treated with antibiotics to stop development of disease – has proved highly effective. However, initial stocks produced in the 1990s recently ran low.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), at the request of the Africa Union/Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources and chief veterinary officers in affected countries, produced one million doses of vaccine to fill this gap. However, for the longer term it is critical that sustainable commercial systems for vaccine production, distribution and delivery are established.

With UK£16.5 million provided by DFID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the charity GALVmed is fostering innovative commercial means to do just this, beginning with the registration and commercial distribution and delivery of this new batch of the vaccine. This will ensure that the vaccine is made available, accessible and affordable to livestock keepers who need it most and to scale up its production for the future.

International Development Minister Mike Foster said:
“Some 1.3 billion of the world's poorest people rely on livestock for their livelihoods. Many Africans depend on the health of their cattle for milk, meat and as their only hard asset for trade and investment. A smallholder dairy farmer can take years to recover economically from the death of a single milking cow. That’s why it’s vital that every possible step is taken to ensure that these essential vaccine doses are sustainably produced, tested and made available to the people who need them.

“DFID is supporting GALVmed to explore ways of transferring the production and distribution of the vaccine into the private sector through local manufacturers and distributors. This is extremely important in making the vaccine affordable, accessible and – crucially – sustainable.”

GALVmed CEO Steve Sloan said:
“Funded by DFID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GALVmed is working to protect livestock and the livelihoods of their owners. Thanks to the highly effective East Coast fever vaccine developed over many years by researchers working in East Africa and then refined and mass produced by ILRI, cattle invaluable to pastoralists such as the Maasai as well as smallholder dairy farmers are being protected. 
“The survival of cattle for the millions who live on tiny margins has a direct effect on quality of life and the dignity of choice and self-determination. Collaborating with ILRI and partners in the developing world, including governments and veterinary distributors and those from the private sector, GALVmed is working to embed the vaccine through registration in East African countries and to scale up its production so that it remains accessible to poor people.
“This pioneering registration effort aims to ensure that the vaccine is approved and monitored by affected nations and enables local firms to sell and distribute it, embedding its sustainability. Registration in Malawi is already complete, with significant progress in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.”
ILRI veterinary scientist Henry Kiara, who has conducted research on the live vaccine for 20 years, explains that ILRI is “looking forward to commercialising the production, distribution and delivery of the vaccine to the smallholder and emerging dairy producers as well as livestock herders” in this region of Africa. “Now that all the building blocks are in place, thanks to past investments by DFID and others”, he says, “we are excited to be at a stage where this vaccine can ‘take off’.”

Over the past several years, the field logistics involved in mass vaccinations of cattle with the infection-and-treatment method have been greatly improved, due largely to the work of a private Company called VetAgro Tanzania Ltd, working with Maasai cattle herders in northern Tanzania. Sustainability underpins GALVmed’s approach and the charity is working with developing world partners to ensure that the vaccine is available to those who need it most, bringing public and private partners together.


About the vaccine
The infection-and-treatment immunisation method against East Coast fever was developed by research conducted over three decades by the East African Community, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) at Muguga, Kenya (www.kari.org), and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in Nairobi, Kenya (www.ilri.org). This long-term research was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) (www.dfid.gov.uk) and other donors of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) (www.cgiar.org). The first bulk batch of the vaccine, produced by ILRI 15 years ago, has protected one million animals, whose survival raised the standard of living for livestock keepers and their families. Field trials of the new vaccine batch, also produced at ILRI, are being completed in accordance with international standards to ensure that it is safe and effective.

About East Coast fever
East Coast fever was first recognized in southern Africa when it was introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century with cattle imported from eastern Africa, where the disease had been endemic for centuries. It caused dramatic losses with high cattle mortality. It has persisted in 11 countries in eastern, central and southern Africa – Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The disease devastates the livelihoods of small-scale mixed crop-and-livestock farmers and smallholder and emerging dairy producers, as well as pastoral livestock herders, such as the Maasai in East Africa.

East Coast fever, or theileriosis, is a devastating cancer-like disease of cattle that often kills the animals within three weeks of infection. It is caused by the single-celled parasite Theileria parva, which is transmitted by the brown ear tick (Rhipicephalus appendiculatus) as it feeds on cattle. In addition to producing the infection-and-treatment vaccine, ILRI is also working to develop a genetically engineered next-generation vaccine.

Some 70 per cent of the human population of sub-Saharan Africa – around half a billion people – depend on livestock for their livelihoods, with farming and herding families relying on cattle for vital sources of food, income, traction, transportation and manure to fertilise croplands.

A case study showing the impact of the disease on Maasai herders is included below. Further case studies illustrating the impact of the infection-and-treatment vaccine on people’s lives are available on the GALVmed website at: www.galvmed.org/path-to-progress

Case Study: East Coast fever in Tanzania
Maasai herders in Tanzania have been particularly devastated by East Coast fever. In parts of northern Tanzania, more than 1 in 5 calves die before reaching maturity (54 months) in the lowlands and more than one third fail to reach maturity in the (wetter) highlands, where tick-borne and other diseases are more prevalent.

Although the infection-and-treatment vaccine is a “live” vaccine, and thus needs to be stored in liquid nitrogen and administered by skilled practitioners, after which the animals must be monitored by experts for several days, the Maasai here are desperate for the new batch to be ready.

Introduction of the previous batch in recent years has drastically reduced calf mortality, from up to 80 per cent to less than 2 per cent. The protection afforded by the vaccine is so good that Maasai herders are willing to pay for these vaccinations. The vaccine appears to protect the animals against other ailments as well and, in addition, those mature animals that are marked with ear tags as having been vaccinated are fetching up to 50 per cent higher prices in the market. The vaccine is allowing these cattle herders to sell more animals and to invest their new income in, for example, bettering their household diets or paying for their children’s education. The new access to this vaccine is facilitating a transition among the Maasai in herd management, from a subsistence- to a market-orientation.

GALVmed has regular contact with those on the ground to improve access to the vaccine, including a meeting with 25 Masaai livestock keepers in Arusha, in northern Tanzania, earlier this year. At that meeting a Masaai representative stated:

“Please thank all those people who made the vaccine and also those who make it available for us to buy. Tell them not to stop their good work. No cattle means no Maasai – and no East Coast fever vaccine means no cattle.”

 

Livestock biosciences for poverty alleviation: One more arrow in the quiver!

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Proceedings of the 4th All Africa Conference on Animal Agriculture ‘The role of biotechnology in animal agriculture to address poverty in Africa’, now available for download

The theme of the 4th All Africa Conference on Animal Agriculture was ‘The role of biotechnology in animal agriculture to address poverty in Africa: Opportunities and challenges’. The conference, which was held in Arusha, Tanzania, in September 2005, was organized by the All Africa Society for Animal Production (AASAP) in association with the Tanzania Society for Animal Production (TSAP), and partnership with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). The recently released proceedings contain over 50 papers by leading experts in biotechnology covering animal health, genetic diversity and improvement and animal feeds and nutrition. The technologies reported ranged from the rather conventional approaches to the more advanced molecular techniques.

ILRI’s director general, Carlos Seré, and ILRI’s director of biotechnology, Ed Rege, presented a paper on Agricultural biotechnology for poverty alleviation at the first plenary session. The paper highlights opportunities for livestock biotechnologies in the areas of animal health through new/improved vaccines and diagnostics, genetic improvement of livestock, conservation of indigenous breeds and genetic diversity, and improving the nutritional quality of feeds. They argue animal agriculture will continue to be of considerable importance for poverty alleviation in Africa for some time to come, and that appropriate applications of biosciences can increase the pace of Africa’s agricultural and economic development.

‘Economic development in Africa will, of necessity, have to be initially linked to agriculture (broadly defined to include crop, livestock, forestry and fish). Staple crops and livestock are most likely to promote economic growth in the continent. To date, public sector investment in biotechnology in Africa has led to few products.

‘However, similar to what is happening in Asia and Latin America, there is a great opportunity for Africa to mobilize science to create wealth for its people and achieve higher economic growth.

‘If a new technology is useful and the price is right, the spread is almost unstoppable. Clearly, biotechnology is not a substitute for other technologies, but is an additional arsenal which should be used as and when appropriate to increase the pace of agricultural development. It is simply another arrow in the quiver!’

Copies of this new publication will be made available at the Africa Agricultural Science Week and the 4th Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) General Assembly in Johannesburg on 10– 16 June 2007.

Download the book: https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/10568/2275/1/Role%20of%20biotechnology.pdf

ILRI vaccine advances published in February 2006 PNAS journal

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Public-private partnership makes major step towards improving livestock health and reducing poverty.

The devastating effects of East Coast fever on the livelihoods of small-scale farmers may one day be a thing of the past as a team of international scientists moves closer towards the development of a vaccine.

“East Coast fever is an intractable problem that ravages cattle of the poor in Africa. The good news is that this can be solved by high-tech science and technological innovations, achievable through strategic partnerships’’. Evans Taracha – ILRI East Coast Fever Vaccine Project Leader

Every year, East Coast fever destroys the small farmer’s dream of escaping poverty in Africa. Killing more than a million cattle and costing some $200 million annually, this tick-borne disease rages across a dozen countries in eastern and central Africa. Now, an international team of scientists has taken the first major step toward a vaccine to prevent East Coast fever. Their work, published in the February 13-17 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shows how genomics can generate pivotal new vaccines.

In the study, scientists from five institutions, including the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), identify five vaccine targets, or candidate proteins that could form the basis for an East Coast fever subunit vaccine. Based on combined bioinformatics analyses and lab tests, these proteins appear to provide a protective immune response to the disease. “This initiative took just three years, after many years of scientists trying other methods,” remarks Vishvanath Nene, former ILRI staff member, a study author and molecular biologist at TIGR. “It’s a huge jump forward.”

To make the jump, researchers used the genome sequence of the parasite responsible for East Coast fever. A tick-borne parasite, Theileria parva, causes the disease. When ticks infected with T. parva bite cattle, they transmit the parasite, launching the disease that typically kills cattle within a month. In July, 2005, TIGR led a research team that published T. parva’s genome sequence, representing roughly 4,000 genes, in Science.

In the current study, Nene, along with Malcolm Gardner and Claire Fraser-Liggett, also of TIGR, relied on known biology to search T. parva’s genome for potential vaccine proteins. First, scientists know that immunity to the parasite, and thus East Coast fever, emerges from immune system cells known as killer T cells. Second, they know that T. parva is an intracellular pathogen–it infects and secretes proteins inside cattle white blood cells, which become malignant. The white blood cell then unwittingly passes small fragments of the secreted parasitic proteins associated with a certain type if its own proteins along to its cell surface. And this is where a vaccine could come in: A vaccine made of the T. parva proteins found on the surface of host cells should trigger an immune response in cattle. Vaccinated cattle would then be protected from the parasite.

To find potential vaccine antigens, the TIGR researchers scanned T. parva’s entire genome for genes that make secreted proteins. In particular, they searched for genes that make a “secretion signal,” a telltale peptide sequence found at the start of secreted proteins. Sure enough, the scientists found some 400 T. parva genes containing the secretion signal. This set of genes provided a starting pool of candidate proteins. Based on further tests, the study’s research team, led by ILRI of Nairobi, Kenya, cloned 55 candidate antigen genes and screened those genes for response by killer T cells taken from cattle immune to East Coast fever. To complement TIGR’s gene selection strategy, ILRI also incorporated a random screen of T. parva DNA for vaccine candidates.

In total, the team found five candidate vaccine antigens. In lab tests, these antigens triggered a response from cattle immune killer T cells. Going a further step further, the scientists inoculated cattle with these antigens and then gave the cattle a potentially lethal dose of T. parva. When compared with control animals, vaccinated cattle showed significantly stronger immune response to the parasite.

“This study is a true milestone,” says Fraser-Liggett, president of TIGR. “It’s one of the first to take advantage of genomic technologies and build a test vaccine using immune killer T cells as a screening reagent.” In addition to TIGR and ILRI, the research team included scientists from: the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Brussels; the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics in Oxford; Sanofi Pasteur in Toronto; the University of Edinburgh; and Merial SAS, an international animal health company. ILRI and Merial have partnered to develop a vaccine against East Coast fever.

By using genomics to understand and fight T. parva, scientists may make advances against related parasites that cause malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases in which killer T cells also play a role in immunity. What’s more, because T. parva launches a cancer-like illness inside the white blood cells of cattle, it may provide a model system for understanding the mechanics of cancer biology.

But for Nene, who was born in Kenya and worked at ILRI for 15 years before coming to TIGR in 2001, the march against East Coast fever is significant reward, itself. “This disease takes an enormous toll on the local society and economy of rural areas across eastern and central Africa, including Maasai and other pastoral communities,” he says. In particular, East Coast fever kills cattle kept by families trying to rise out of poverty. If researchers are successful, Nene notes, the entire region will have new reason to hope for a better life. Evans Taracha, ILRI project leader, also highlights the importance of strategic research partnerships to overcome this and similar diseases.

TIGR’s portion of the PNAS study was funded independently by TIGR and by sub-contract from the Animal Health Program of the United Kingdom Department for International Development, with previous contributions from J. Craig Venter and the ILRI for the T. parva genome project.

Research breakthrough against cattle killer

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Innovation, capacity building and partnerships to combat a deadly African cattle disease are in the news. This month, ILRI's East Coast fever research is featured in two top journals – Science and the Journal of International Development. On 1 July 2005, America's leading scientific journal Science reported on the genome sequencing of a deadly parasite, Theileria parva, which causes East Coast fever (ECF), an infectious tick-borne disease that kills two cows every minute in Africa. This ground-breaking research was led by scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi Kenya, and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), based in the USA. In addition to advancing research into parasitic livestock diseases, this research will also be valuable to scientists studying human malaria and cancers. TIGR/ILRI News Release ILRI News Backgrounder The ECF project is also of great interest to international development practitioners and policymakers. An article published in the July edition of the Journal of International Development by James Smith of Edinburgh University uses the ECF project as a case study example of how institutional research and development is changing. The old model 'technology-led' projects, often criticised for failing to deliver effective and affordable products downstream, is being replaced with  new model partnerships that have innovation and capacity building built in and that aim to deliver demand-led products of benefit to the poor in developing countries. Smith describes the ECF project as 'a potentially new model of… research and development partnership' which is an example of “a more ‘complete’ approach to innovation”. The ECF project has many partners and a very clear product focus. The project builds capacity in new ways, as those involved are forced to break out of their traditional boundaries. Scientists who were interviewed felt the project was encouraging them to think in new ways – like farmers and like businesspeople. There are many examples of 'good' technologies still sitting on shelves because scientists failed to consider the needs and circumstances of the end users of the technologies, such as whether the product would be accessible and affordable to farmers. International development professionals and donors are becoming increasingly focused on capacity building, partnerships, innovation systems and, ultimately, the delivery of tangible results, including products, as integral parts of R&D activity. There is a shift away from projects that could be described as 'research for the sake of research' to demand-led research, operated by many partners as a collaborating network that accomplishes a specific goal. John McDermott, ILRI’s Deputy Director General – Research said: 'The ECF Project illustrates ILRI’s new modus operandi, which generates innovation through strategic partnerships. Each partner is doing what they are best at – with the shared goal of delivering an effective and affordable vaccine for East Coast fever that will ultimately benefit millions of small-scale farmers in Africa.' There are lessons to be learned and the ECF project experience looks likely to be scrutinised further to gain more insights into new ways of doing R&D for greater benefits to the world's poor. Smith concludes: 'The East Coast fever vaccine project does appear to offer a new approach to prioritizing research and design, building capacity, and eventually producing an efficacious product. It does appear, however, that the positive spin-offs from the approach may not have been pre-planned but that the approach was shaped by a combination of the contingencies of vaccine production and the realities of institutional R&D in Kenya. The trick will be to identify exactly what makes this approach successful…'.