Adenoviral Vaccines Offer Safest Approach to ASF Vaccine Development

The Director and CEO of VIDO-InterVac says the use of a virus that's harmless to pigs as a mechanism to deliver the proteins that will trigger an immune response to African Swine Fever is the safest available approach to the development of vaccines to protect the Canadian swine herd from the infection.

 

While researchers around the world are using various techniques to develop vaccines to protect pigs from African Swine Fever, the approach being used by VIDO-InterVac involves inserting specific proteins from African Swine Fever into another harmless virus for delivery as a vaccine.

 

VIDO-InterVac Director and CEO Dr. Volker Gerdts says there is good indication that adenoviral vectors are potent and may work to prevent African Swine Fever.

 

 

Using an adenovirus as a vector offers the advantage that you don't have to actually use the virus, the African Swine Fever virus. Everything we do is working the adenoviral vector and so we're not really including, at any step, the African Swine Fever virus in this process.

 

That is very important from a biosecurity point of view to ensure that our Canadian swine herd is safe and that we're not by accident introducing the virus into the herd. The opposite is true for these live attenuated vaccines, these gene deletion mutants that are being tested right now.

 

They are essentially an attenuated form of the virus, still a live African Swine Fever that is just not as disease causing as the wild type would be but there is always the chance or the risk that they may revert back. We, as a country, really don't want to have these gene deletion mutants here in Canada. We never want to have virus in our country, in our herd so using the adenoviral vector as a vaccine platform has many many advantages over other technologies.

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.