Public Funding for Moredun Scientific Limited

Awaiting Public Project Summary

PRRS is widely regarded as the most economically important disease in swine, estimated to cost global swine producers in excess of £1billion per annum in production losses alone. These losses are largely the result of a failure to develop and deploy effective vaccines. Cambivac aims to produce vaccines that more effectively control the disease and can respond rapidly to emerging threats. We believe the technology under development collaborating with Moredun in this study, ultimately deployed towards effective PRRSV vaccines could derive substantial earnings for the UK animal health industry and be an important tool to combat the challenges posed by PRRS disease

Development of a service offering for field trials for veterinary medicinal products.Infectious diseases of livestock can have a devastating impact on animal health and subsequently on food security and supply.Increasing the capacity and capability to conduct trials of veterinary medicinal products in the UK for the animal health industry will benefit livestock producers through more rapid introduction of improved disease control measures.

The project is focussed on the problem of enzootic pneumonia in pigs which is a major economic concern to the global pig industry. It is a multifactorial syndrome caused by the interactions of several pathogens as well as environmental, management and genetic factors. Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae is the primary pathogen contributing to the disease. The aim of the project is to develop an experimental model of M.hyopneumonia infection in piglets which mimics a natural respiratory infection and would enable the efficacy and safety testing of improved candidate vaccines and therapeutic drugs to protect against and treat the disease. The organism is challenging to culture and there are no validated models of the disease commercially available to the animal health industry, the development of an effective model would be a significant benefit to the industry. The model would be offered to global animal health companies on a contract research basis to the required quality standard of Good Laboratory Practice.