UB and Pitzer College Collaborates on Vaccine Project
The University of Botswana and Pitzer College in Claremont, California are collaborating in a vaccine project to develop innovative technologies for the creation of low-cost, yet effective Botswana-produced vaccines for human and animal diseases prevalent in southern Africa.
The Project is on-going and preliminary work has started, and orders have been placed for reagents from South Africa. The primary strategy of the project is to use the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) in plants to rapidly identify immunoactive antigens for disease-causing human and animal pathogens. The vaccines will be made available for distribution in Botswana and countries in the SADC region.
Vaccines are considered the most cost-effective control measure for diseases. The World Bank has stated that it costs less than $20 to prevent a year of illness by using a vaccine targeted against a specific pathogen. Unfortunately, the majority of developing countries are ill-equipped to create vaccines and current production costs are high. Moreover, the manufacture of vaccines for many diseases is unattractive to private enterprises because there is little or no return on their investments.
Professor Larry Grill of Pitzer College said in a media briefing on June 17, 2009 that Botswana’s beef and tourist industries may be under threat due to animal diseases, particularly foot and mouth disease, lumpy skin disease, and rabies. Therefore, the project will assist in controlling infectious animal diseases and human diseases such as malaria, and tuberculosis (TB) at a later stage throughout the country once the vaccines are manufactured.
The goal of this project is to demonstrate that vaccines can be simply and effectively produced in Botswana. As a pilot project, the team is developing a system for the production of a vaccine against lumpy skin disease (LSD), which causes a chronic debility in cattle comparable to foot-and-mouth disease and leads to serious nutritional and economic losses because of the high morbidity rate following outbreaks. Currently, there is no specific antiviral treatment available for LSD-infected cattle. This disease is decimating cattle in large numbers in Botswana and other countries in southern Africa. Once this is done, diseases of economic importance for both humans and animals will be targeted for production such as foot and mouth, rabies and malaria.
The proposed vaccine project will address strategic areas of research and will focus its resources on tackling priority areas in human and animal health. Thus, the establishment of a Plant Vaccine Research Project will enable UB to be more visible nationally and globally in specific and relevant areas of science. This research will also contribute on capacity building and staff development. The output of the vaccine initiative will generate data and intellectual property to be harnessed by Batswana for the development of skills and a world class research institute.
The goal of this project is also to demonstrate that vaccines can be simply and effectively produced in African countries. The tobacco mosaic virus will accumulate to high levels in plants which will be grown in the green house. The TMV can then be extracted using methodologies that are cost-effective, efficient, and generally applicable since each tobamovirus structure has similar physical and biochemical properties.
Professor Grill is working with scientist from the Biological Sciences Department in the University of Botswana. They include two virologists, Dr Teresa Sebunya and Mr Melvin Leteane and a molecular biologist, Dr. Wata Mpoloka.