Engineering better vaccines for foot-and-mouth disease

Although efficacious and safe, current vaccines for FMD suffer from drawbacks. Among these are that the immune response to the vaccine interferes with the ability to detect vaccinated animals that have subsequently become infected and could carry and shed the virus, creating an obstacle to re-instating disease-free status to countries/regions that vaccinate to control outbreaks. Multiple diagnostic tests are available to identify animals that have been infected with FMDV by detection of antibodies to viral non-structural proteins (NSP) that are present in low concentration in traditional vaccines and are poorly immunogenic in vaccine preparations. However, these tests are not 100% reliable. To circumvent this problem, we have developed a new generation of vaccines that express the "empty capsid" subunit of the virus, in the absence of one of the most immunogenic NSPs, 3Dpol. Here we describe delivery of the empty capsid subunits by recombinant replication-defective human adenovirus type 5 (Ad5). These Ad5-vectored empty capsid vaccines can protect pigs from FMDV challenge as early as 7 days post-vaccination. A second problem with current FMD vaccines is that they do not induce protective immunity quickly, a drawback that is likely to be shared by our Ad5-vectored empty capsid vaccine. To overcome this problem, we have developed a prophylactic antiviral treatment consisting of an Ad5 encoding porcine interferon alpha (pIFNalpha). Administration of Ad5-pIFNalpha protects swine from FMD as early as one day post-administration. The combination of this antiviral treatment and the empty capsid subunit vaccine should induce rapid and complete protection from FMD, and could overcome current diagnostic problems.