Sustainable management of aquaculture fish health through the development of low cost plant-derived vaccines

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The aquaculture industry is the fastest growing food-producing sector worldwide. To achieve a sustainable aquaculture food-fish production and manage the aquaculture fish health, vaccination has been found to be an effective method for increasing economic output and improving animal welfare. It has also permitted the development of more sustainable fish farming with reduced use of antibiotics and chemicals. Since viral diseases pose a serious threat to aquacultures worldwide, this lack of preventive measures has extensive negative consequences. For instance, pancreas disease (PD), a viral fish disease caused by the Salmonid alphavirus (SAV) with 6 known subtypes, SAV1-6 is of significant impact on salmonid aquaculture. Another viral fish viral disease, infectious haematopoietic necrosis (IHN) which can affect most species of salmonid fish reared in fresh water or sea water, is caused by infectious haematopoietic necrosis virus. The economic loss caused by IHNV on farmed rainbow trout is a challenging task in Finnish aquaculture. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop low-cost fish vaccines to assist sustainable aquaculture production in Europe. The project aims to advance our existing plant-based recombinant protein production technologies to establish a plant-based low cost vaccine production platform to facilitate the future production of fish vaccines in large quantity at low costs. We have selected PD and IHN as two cases for proof-of-principal to test three different tobacco-production technologies (i.e. transient expression by producing virus like particles (VLPs), chloroplast genetic engineering and tobacco BY-2 cell line platform). By comparing the three systems in terms of total production costs, scaling-up potential and timeline by the end of the project period, PlantVac project can provide a technology based plant production platform for future production of PD, IHN vaccines as well as other fish vaccines.

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