Finding a needle in a (molecular) haystack: A decade-long search for a parasite molecule on which to build a new vaccine against East Coast fever comes to fruition

For the November 2011 ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ event at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Roger Pellé, a molecular biologist from Cameroon, reflects on ILRI’s biotechnology research accomplishments over the past decade that have involved partnerships with centres and countries in Africa.

‘I first came to ILRI in 1990 to work on trypanosomosis, a cattle disease spread by the tsetse fly in much of Africa. Ten years later, I moved to work with a team that was working to find a vaccine for East Coast fever, another of Africa’s major livestock diseases.

‘One of our greatest achievements in the last 10 years has been the discovery—through collaboration with African institutions working on animal diseases—of an antigen that enabled the development of a vaccine against East Coast fever.

‘During this period, we managed, for the first time, to identify a “credible candidate antigen” that was shown, in the lab, to induce the same type of protection that a live vaccine could offer.

‘Even though this finding does not mean that livestock keepers will immediately access the vaccine—trials about its final effect in the field are still taking place—the discovery of the antigen was a critical step towards our understanding of how the vaccine will work and how the elements it contains will induce protection when the live vaccine is used.

‘Between 2006 and 2007, we also worked with partners across Africa, such as the African Union Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR) and national research centres, to improve the diagnostics for, and surveillance of, the bird flu epidemic. We brought together African human health and veterinary research experts from across the continent and trained them in rapid diagnostics and advanced surveillance methods. This was the first time this kind of joint training between human health and animal research experts was carried out in Africa.

‘The challenge for us now lies in finalizing work on the East Coast fever vaccine so that farmers can use it to protect their livestock from the disease.’

Watch the 4-minute interview with Roger Pellé .

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On 9 and 10 November 2011, the ILRI Board of Trustees hosts a 2-day ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ to discuss and reflect on livestock research for development. The event will synthesize sector and ILRI learning and help frame future livestock research for development directions.

The liveSTOCK Exchange will also mark the leadership and contributions of Dr. Carlos Seré as ILRI Director General.  See all posts in this series / Sign up for email alerts

 

‘Out of the lab and into the field–with our clients’: Phil Toye on getting the balance in animal health research right

For the November 2011 ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ event at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Phil Toye, an Australian immunologist who leads ILRI’s animal health research on development of diagnostics and vaccines for diseases of farm animals in Africa and other developing regions, reflects on the changes he’s seen at ILRI.

Toye first came to ILRI’s Nairobi campus in 1986, when it was then the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases (ILRAD). He left ILRAD in 1994 to join a medium-sized biotech  company in Australia. The Nairobi  institute he left behind was focused almost exclusively on developing vaccines against two devastating cattle diseases of Africa.

When Toye returned to the Nairobi campus in 2006, he experienced at first hand the ‘dramatic’ changes that had occurred in the intervening years. He came to an institute ‘with a much broader range of expertise, going well beyond molecular biologists and immunologists, to sociologists and economists, and to people who study and understand market dynamics and market access by the poor.

‘I think this gives ILRI a unique potential to look at the problems affecting small livestock owners, poor livestock owners, and developing practical solutions for their livestock problems,’ says Toye.

Among the achievements his team has made over the last five years, Toye cites that of building a much more balanced portfolio of activities. ‘Five years ago, our major activities concerned East Coast fever, in particular development of a vaccine against this disease, with a few smaller activities. Now we also work on African swine fever and contagious bovine pleuro-pneumonia. What’s important is that we’re developing these technologies while looking beyond them; we’re looking at the social aspects of the livestock owners that these diseases affect, looking at the ability of these technologies to meet end-user needs, and at how the technologies could be effectively rolled out.

‘The other balance we brought to ILRI’s animal health portfolio was to increase the number of projects focused on more immediate impacts. An example is our work underpinning the roll out of an infection-and-treatment method of  vaccination against East Coast fever, a vaccine that is protecting the lives of cattle, particularly in northern Tanzania and also in Kenya and Uganda.

‘The development of a pen-side test for pig tapeworm is another more recent outcome of ours. And more recently still is the development of a thermo-stable vaccine—one that remains stable without the need for refrigeration—for a disease of sheep and goats known by its French name ‘peste des petite ruminants’.

‘A third achievement of our group is development of field-based activities. In the last five years, we initiated a project in Busia, in western Kenya, called ‘IDEAL,’ which is funded by the Wellcome Trust and led by the University of Edinburgh. For this project, we established a field laboratory in Busia. That laboratory has since been used by another Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘People, Animals and Zoonoses’ Project, or PAZ for short, led by Eric Fevre, and more recently by a team doing substantial work on African swine fever led by Richard Bishop.

‘Such work is getting people out of the laboratory and interacting with our clients—poor livestock owners.

‘In future, we need to get the balance right between the amount of applied research we do, which has more immediate impacts, and undertaking more basic research to solve the more intractable problems. The latter work of course carries higher risk but also can have higher returns if we manage to develop solutions. That’s versus spreading ourselves too thin over several projects, where we don’t really have traction.

Our moving into the CGIAR Research Programs should give us even more focus and impacts in future.’

Watch a 5-minute filmed interview of Phil Toye:

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On 9 and 10 November 2011, the ILRI Board of Trustees hosts a 2-day ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ to discuss and reflect on livestock research for development. The event will synthesize sector and ILRI learning and help frame future livestock research for development directions.

The liveSTOCK Exchange will also mark the leadership and contributions of Dr. Carlos Seré as ILRI Director General.  See all posts in this series / Sign up for email alerts

 

Driven by technology, (finally) embracing diversity: A geneticist’s views on the evolution of biotech research at ILRI

For the November 2011 ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ event at ILRI, Steve Kemp, a livestock molecular geneticist, reflects on the evolution of ILRI’s research agenda and the role of biotechnology research in that agenda . . .

Steve Kemp first came to the Nairobi campus of the International Livestock research Institute (ILRI) in 1985 when it was (literally) another institute, known as the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases (ILRAD). ILRAD was one of two institutions formed in Africa in the early 1970s that joined to become ILRI in 1995 (the other was the International Livestock Centre for Africa, ILCA, based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia).

Kemp left ILRAD just as the amalgamation with ILCA took place, in 1995, to return to the University of Liverpool, where he worked for the next ten years. He came back to ILRI in 2005 to again work in the Nairobi animal disease laboratories. And on his return he ‘found a very different place’.

ILRAD had focused almost exclusively on improving control of two major protozoan animal diseases of Africa: East Coast fever, caused by the tick-borne parasite Theileria parva, and African animal trypanosomosis, an animal form of human sleeping sickness, caused by tsetse-borne trypanosome parasites. Kemp has spent his professional life working on the latter, looking into the molecular biology of genetic resistance to trypanosomosis displayed by some ancient native African livestock breeds. The objective of his research has been to, first, locate the genes that control this useful disease resistance trait, and then to make better and wider use of those genes to protect more of Africa’s stock from this wasting illness, which is arguably the most economically devastating of the continent’s livestock diseases.

When Kemp returned to the ILRAD, now ILRI, Nairobi laboratories in 2005, he found a very different place. The veterinary vaccine developers in the ‘wet’ laboratories were now surrounded by other kinds of ‘dry-lab’ scientists, from livestock breeders and other kinds of ‘whole animal’ livestock scientists to rangeland specialists, landscape ecologists and agricultural systems analysts and economists—’even’ sociologists.

This was not, as Kemp admits, an easy passage for him. Much of the strength and reputation of ILRAD’s animal disease work had been eroded in the transition from ILRAD to ILRI, and it was easy to put the blame on the wider research agenda that ILRI was now, perhaps too ambitiously, pursuing, with the result that biotechnology expertise was being diluted. Getting used to working in an ‘integrated’ research environment, Kemp says, where biotechnology plays only a part in a greater research agenda, took getting used to.

What’s interesting is that Kemp’s own research area—the genetics of animal disease resistance—had been doing a lot of its own integrating as the gene and information revolutions took hold, with their rapid advances exploding with whole-genome sequencing and other transformative technologies, necessitating the absorption of new kinds of specialists such as bioinformaticians and opening the door to direct relevant work with medical researchers, ecologists and others. Kemp leads international research groups now at the very forefront of this fast-changing multidisciplinary frontier.

Kemp says he has come round to seeing the value of working within an even more broadly integrated research portfolio, and will be spending even more of his time in the near future on human as well as animal health issues. And who knows where that may lead him over the next decade . . . .

Watch the 4-minute interview with Steve Kemp.

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On 9 and 10 November 2011, the ILRI Board of Trustees hosted a 2-day ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ to discuss and reflect on livestock research for development. The event synthesized sector and ILRI learning and helped frame future livestock research for development directions.

The liveSTOCK Exchange also marked the leadership and contributions of Dr. Carlos Seré as ILRI Director General. See all posts in this series / Sign up for email alerts