Anti-tick Vaccine Development: Status and Perspectives

10. Public-private partnership enabled use of anti-tick vaccine for integrated cattle fever tick eradication in the USA

“…An incentive for animal health companies to partner with academic institutions and public agencies is having access to technological platforms that can be developed into a product, including vaccines, rapidly (Rippke 2105;Yarbrough 2016). Despite the testing in cattle of several recombinant proteins regarded as candidate antigens since the commercialization of TickGard® and Gavac™ (Almazan et al 2010;De la Fuente et al 2016;Fang and Pung 2011;Lew-Tabor and Rodriguez Valle 2016;Olds et al 2013), it appears that a gap between basic research and translation to novel therapeutics, also known as the 'valley of death' , may have occurred in the anti-tick vaccine scientific field (Collins et al 2016;Guerrero et al 2012;Plotkin et al 2015). For example, the antigen pP0 was reported to afford 96% efficacy against R. microplus infesting cattle (Rodriguez-Mallon et al 2015), but we were unaware of a commercial vaccine based on that technology as of this writing.…”

1. Livestock pests and vector-borne diseases – a much neglected subject

“…An incentive for animal health companies to partner with academic institutions and public agencies is having access to technological platforms that can be developed into a product, including vaccines, rapidly (Rippke 2105;Yarbrough 2016). Despite the testing in cattle of several recombinant proteins regarded as candidate antigens since the commercialization of TickGard® and Gavac™ (Almazan et al 2010;De la Fuente et al 2016;Fang and Pung 2011;Lew-Tabor and Rodriguez Valle 2016;Olds et al 2013), it appears that a gap between basic research and translation to novel therapeutics, also known as the 'valley of death' , may have occurred in the anti-tick vaccine scientific field (Collins et al 2016;Guerrero et al 2012;Plotkin et al 2015). For example, the antigen pP0 was reported to afford 96% efficacy against R. microplus infesting cattle (Rodriguez-Mallon et al 2015), but we were unaware of a commercial vaccine based on that technology as of this writing.…”