Studentship: Immune responses to attenuated peste des petits ruminants virus vaccines and correlates of protection

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Peste des petits ruminants (PPR) is a severe viral disease of goats and sheep. The PPR virus (PPRV) is widespread in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, killing thousands of animals per year, and more countries suffer from the disease all the time. It has a particularly severe impact on poor livestock keepers who depend on goats and sheep for their livelihoods. There is a growing move towards a global control effort against PPR. Any control programme will depend on vaccination, which will use one of the available attenuated PPRV vaccines. While these are known to be effective, we know little about the actual nature of the protective immune response, nor whether all the existing vaccines can protect against all strains of PPRV from anywhere in the world.
This project intends to try to answer these questions. The knowledge acquired will also be of use to those working on PPRV vaccine production and those involved in setting up control programmes for PPR. In this project, we will measure the production of PPRV-specific antibodies elicited by the most common PPRV vaccines used (one from Africa and one from India), as well as the priming of PPRV-specific immune cells (T cells). We will confirm that the vaccines can protect against PPRV from each of the known genetic lineages of the virus by exposing vaccinated animals to these viruses. We will use various amounts of PPRV vaccine to determine the minimum effective dose that protects the animals from disease following infection with a pathogenic strain of PPRV, and determine whether it is the antibody response, the T cell response, or both together that protects. This knowledge will enable future tests of vaccine efficacy to focus on measuring the immune response, thereby avoiding testing vaccine batches by exposing animals to pathogenic virus. In addition to the general usefulness of the data acquired in the project, the student will acquire a thorough grounding in livestock immunology and virology.

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