IVVN hosts first virtual symposium on Vaccines for Swine

The IVVN hosts annual scientific conferences that bring members together to form novel collaborations, and the Network has successfully hosted conferences in Nairobi in 2018 and in London in 2019. However, the IVVN’s third annual conference, originally scheduled for March 2020 in Hanoi, Vietnam, was unfortunately cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, the IVVN have decided to utilise the original programme, which was divided into four species-specific themes (covering vaccines for Swine, Poultry, Ruminants and Aquaculture), and host the themes as a series of online symposia over a period of a six months.

The first of these on “Vaccines for Swine” took place on Wednesday 16 December 2020 and brought together 80 participants from across the globe. Professor Simon Graham from the Pirbright Institute in the UK and Dr Filip Claes from the Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases in Thailand kindly chaired the symposium.

The symposium began with presentations from Professor Xiangxi Wang (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) who gave a talk on the architecture of African swine fever virus and implications for viral assembly and a presentation from Dr Christopher Netherton (The Pirbright Institute, UK) who presented research on the identification and characterisation of protective antigens to develop an ASFV subunit vaccine. Next, Dr Peera Jaru-Ampornpan (National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC) in Thailand) presented a talk on using porcine circovirus 2 vaccine as a model to build capacity for sustainable vaccine production in Thailand, followed by Dr Rebecca McLean (The Pirbright Institute, UK) who presented research on developing a ‘One Health’ Nipah virus vaccine to protect animal and public health.

Awardees of IVVN pump-priming grant funding then presented their work with talks from Dr Anna Lacasta (International Livestock Research Institute, Kenya) on the project “New antigen identification in the African swine fever virus genome thorough a plasmid DNA library” and a joint presentation from Professor Marshall Lightowlers (University of Melbourne, Australia) and Professor Bryan Charleston (The Pirbright Institute, UK) on their project “A single dose vectored Taenia solium vaccine”.

Following the talks there was a poster session, which allowed participants to present a poster or a flash talk in breakout rooms, and to interact and network with other participants.

Thank you to all of the fantastic presenters for sharing their research, to Professor Simon Graham and Dr Filip Claes for chairing the symposium, to our symposium sponsors and to everyone who joined us for our first virtual symposium.

The next symposium will be focusing on “Vaccines for Poultry” and will take place on Thursday 25 February 2021.