Vaccination against foot-and-mouth disease virus using peptides conjugated to nano-beads

Vaccination against foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) is a major problem as current vaccines do not allow easy differentiation between infected and vaccinated animals. Furthermore, large scale production of inactivated virus poses significant risks. To address this we investigated the feasibility of using inert nano-beads that target antigen to dendritic cells (DCs) to induce immune responses against FMDV-specific synthetic peptides in sheep. Our results demonstrate that while single peptides induce responses in most sheep, the combination of multiple peptides either conjugated separately to individual nano-beads or conjugated as a mixture induce significant cell-mediated (CM) and humoral immune responses.