British scientists develop safer foot-and-mouth vaccine

Producing vaccines against viral threats is a potentially hazardous business and that’s why manufacturers have to operate strict controls to ensure that no pathogens escape. British scientists have developed a new method to create an entirely synthetic vaccine which doesn’t rely on using live infectious virus, meaning it is much safer. They have developed a “holy grail” vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease that is safer and more resilient than current vaccines, according to an article published in journal PLOS pathogens Wednesday. At the moment, animals are given a small dose of live infectious virus to stimulate the body’s immune system into producing antibodies that recognise and destroy the pathogen whenever it appears in the bloodstream. Now scientists believe they can produce an entirely synthetic vaccine thanks to atomic analysis of the virus using Britain’s particle accelerator, the Diamond Light Source, near Oxford in southern England. Using the data, a team of scientists from Oxford and Reading Universities and the Pirbright Institute were able to reconstruct the outside structure of the virus, which triggers the production of antibodies. The hollow shell contains no pathogenic RNA — the genetic material viruses use to replicate themselves — so there is no chance of accidental infection during vaccination. The scientists were also able to tweak the structure to make it stronger. Pre-clinical trials found it to be stable at temperatures up to 56C (132 Fahrenheit) for at least two hours. “What we have achieved here is close to the holy grail of foot-and-mouth vaccines,” said Dave Stuart, Life Sciences Director at Diamond, and MRC Professor of Structural Biology at the University of Oxford. “Unlike traditional vaccines, there is no chance that the empty-shell vaccine could revert to an infectious form.” The technology should also be transferable to other viruses from the same family, such as poliovirus and hand-foot-and-mouth disease, a human virus endemic in South-East Asia, he added. Foot-and-mouth is endemic livestock in central Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia.