The February 2018 issue of the Animal Health Matters newsletter from HealthforAnimals features portraits of four ILRI animal health scientists who are working to develop more effective livestock vaccines. Continue reading
To support research on the biology of T. parva and the identification of additional candidate vaccine antigens, this article reports on the sporozoite proteome as defined by LC–MS/MS analysis. Continue reading
Originally posted on ILRI news:
A Tunisian man carries a sheep suffering from peste des petits ruminants (PPR), also known as sheep and goat plague, a highly contagious animal disease affecting small ruminants. Once introduced, the virus can infect up to 90% of an animal heard and the disease kills anywhere from 30 to 70%…
There is inadequate herd and community level information on the impact of CBPP and its control by vaccination to allow adequate allocation of resources for CBPP control in affected ecosystems of Kenya. A study was designed in Narok district to provide this crucial information for the Maasai ecosystem. Continue reading
There is a great deal of similarity in the immunopathology, genomics and biology of T. parva and T. annulata. Similar protective immune responses are directed against the sporozoite and schizont stages of the parasites, and it is remarkable that many candidate sporozoite and schizont antigens are also so similar to each other. Hence, advances in development of subunit vaccines against one parasite species are likely to be readily applicable to the other. Continue reading
The ECF consortium is aiming at producing a vaccine that would trigger both an antibody response and a T cell dependent response. Thanks to the whole genome sequence of Theileria parva and its annotation, we have short listed hundreds of antigen candidates, but the number of antigen candidate that can be tested in cattle is limited. How do we narrow down the list of candidates to a handful that can be studied rigorously in live experiments? Continue reading
The recent meeting of the East Coast fever consortium, which brings together experts in immunology, parasitology and genomics from three continents (ILRI, Edinburgh, Antwerp, IGS, as well as the organization that produces the infection and treatment method (ITM) vaccine, provided a venue to discuss a way forward. Continue reading
As part of a BMGF-funded consortium a novel Next-generation-sequencing (NGS) approach to high-throughput MHC typing of cattle has been developed that allows rapid, cheap and high resolution characterisation of bovine MHC genotypes Continue reading
A recent review, as well as current studies in the primary literature, present examples of how cancer research can be used in the study of Theileria biology, suggesting that this might be a turning point that could revolutionize how T. parva infection is studied. Continue reading
We are here aiming to directly identify the parts or ‘antigens’ of the Theileria parva parasite that are visible to the cellular immune system during infection using a state-of-the-art mass spectrometry approach in order to inform the development of targeted vaccines against Theileriosis. Continue reading
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