TarGet - New targeting vaccines for sustainable aquaculture
Fish diseases represent one of the major risks to the continued growth of the aquaculture industry. This project will develop a flexible and versatile fish vaccine platform (TarGet) where vaccines can be easily tailored to any viral disease and fish species.
Vaccines carry whole or fragments of pathogens and are given as a mean to fight infectious diseases. The vaccine stimulates the body’s immune system and places the host on alert in later encounters with the pathogen in question. Sometimes, protection fails because the host's immune system simply does not respond to the vaccine adequately.
In TarGet we explore new approaches to ensure a strong and efficient immune response, a principle that can be easily adapted to a variety of pathogens and species.
TarGet vaccines: specific immune cell targeting-units (A) are identified in the fish together with antigens (B) from the pathogen to be vaccinated against. These are combined in the laboratory (C) in a plasmid-construct. Different targeting-units (D) coupled to the antigen are tested in vaccine challenge trials (E) and the combination that induces protective immune responses in the fish will constitute the vaccine. The platform is expanded to accommodate additional families of fish by introducing homologous targeting-units corresponding to those already identified. This modularity provides a flexible and versatile vaccine platform on which vaccines can easily be tailored to any pathogen.
