Foot-and-mouth disease vaccines
A problem presented at the UK MMSG Imperial College 2009.
- Presented by:
- (Immunology, Institute for Animal Health)
- Participants:
Problem Description
Foot-and-mouth is a disease of global socioeconomic importance, and vaccination is the principle tool of control in endemic countries. Effective vaccination requires the presence of intact inactivated virus or virus-like particles, but the virus is very unstable, which makes this difficult. The participants are asked to determine the effect of stability of the virus particles on the effectiveness of vaccination by developing a model of the uptake and processing of the virus after vaccination.
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Study Group Report
The study group was asked to consider number of different, but related, questions. The development of a model has helped to elucidate some of these as well as offering a clear way to proceed in the future. The model includes two distinct pathways: short term B-cell production and longer production of target T-cells. Analysis of these produces the behaviour expected from experimental observations, including the timing of the peak in the long and short term responses.
Results suggest that vaccine stability may not have a pronounced impact on the timing of the T cell response, but will affect its magnitude. Future work will look in more detail to how these predictions compare with experimental evidence that vaccine produced from different virus serotypes can differentially stimulate T cell responses. The system achieves good qualitative agreement with empirical observations of the system response to booster vaccine doses, and suggests that stable vaccine benefit more from multiple doses. The model also predicts that high decay rate can be compensated with an increase in dose, but this is perhaps not surprising for mass action model.
Follow-Up Activities
The following publications have been written as a result of this problem:
- Modelling the influence of foot-and-mouth disease vaccine antigen stability and dose on the bovine immune response
- (2012)
- PLoS ONE 7 (2).
The following follow-up meetings have occured to continue work on aspects of this problem:
- 2009 Foot and Mouth Disease Followup Meeting
- Wednesday 9th December 2009, Institute for Animal Health, Pirbright