Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) vaccines

Foot-and-mouth is a disease of global socioeconomic importance, with vaccination the principle tool for control in endemic countries. Improvements in vaccines require advances in our understanding of the host immune response, one aspect of which the study group is asked to consider. Major problems limit the capacity of FMDV vaccines to control infections in developing countries. The virus is notoriously unstable which reduces the yield and effectiveness of the vaccine. A FMDV-specific difficulty is that effective vaccination requires the presence of intact inactivated virus or virus-like particles. Individual proteins or peptides have proven to be insufficiently immunogenic for use as vaccine antigen.