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£5m project to help combat the foot-and-mouth threat
Foot and Mouth disease
More than £5m is to be spent on exploring new methods for controlling foot-and-mouth disease.
University of Leeds scientists will take part in a £5.6m project to develop new methods for the disease, which caused devastation to England’s countryside in 2001 and 2007.
The disease is caused by one of the most contagious viruses in mammals, affecting cattle, sheep, goats and pigs.
The five-year Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) funded project will bring together researchers from the Universities of St Andrews, Leeds, Edinburgh, Dundee and the Pirbright Institute to improve diagnosis and develop a new generation of vaccines.
Dr Nicola Stonehouse, from the University of Leeds’ School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, said: “Foot-and-mouth disease is still, especially in this part of the country, a very emotive thing to talk about. However, it is an accident waiting to happen because you have so much of this disease elsewhere in the world.”
Professor David Rowlands, Emeritus Professor of Molecular Virology at Leeds, said: “What we are trying to do is understand the basic biology of the virus so we can use that in order to underpin a new approach to a vaccine. This project is a strategic effort getting together leading UK researchers to address this threat.”
Existing foot and mouth vaccines must be kept refrigerated and require multiple boosters, which makes them difficult to administer effectively in parts of the world where foot-and-mouth is endemic. The virus also has a large array of different strains, which makes concocting a suitable vaccine cocktail even more challenging.
Dr Stonehouse said: “The different teams involved in this project will be approaching this big problem from various angles. In Leeds, we are particularly interested in the regulatory regions at both ends of the virus genome. They make up about a seventh of the genome and we do not know what they do. The objective is to tamper with these areas and make a very sick version of the virus that will be able to challenge the animal’s immune response but not produce the disease.”
Professor Martin Ryan of the University of St Andrews, who is leading the project, said the researchers will also attempt to use knowledge of how the virus grows in cells to make a new type of virus that could only grow in specially designed ‘helper’ cells, meaning the virus could not then grow in animals.
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Thursday 23 May 2013
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