Virus-like-particle (VLP) vaccine for chicken infectious anemia.

The human population relies on food animals as a major source of high quality protein. Maintaining the health of these animals is of critical importance to good human nutrition worldwide. Chicken anemia virus (CAV) is an important immunosuppressive pathogen of poultry. Our Phase I goal is to create a CAV virus-like-particle (VLP) that will offer a less expensive source of high quality antigens that can be more consistently produced for CAV diagnostics and vaccines. CAV is the cause of chicken infectious anemia (CIA), a contagious immunosuppressive disease that causes a substantial economic impact on the poultry industry due to reduced flock performance. The quality of current CAV vaccines is inconsistent and they do not provide long lasting immunity. LARAD will produce recombinant baculoviruses expressing the VP1 and VP2 genes of CAV. These will be used to co-infect Sf9 cells to generate a CAV-VLP. LARAD will also complete the safety and purity experiments required for Conditional Licensure of the vaccine by the USDA Center for Veterinary Biologics. In addition, the CAV-VLP will be tested for its utility as an antigen in an ELISA diagnostic assay. A commercial opportunity exists for a CAV-VLP vaccine because CIA is a significant problem in the poultry industry. Patents on baculovirus expressed CAV-VLP have expired without successful commercialization of the product, which has the potential to replace current live-attenuated vaccines, a $2.3 million market.