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http://www.canada.com/health/story.html?id=B8A411C6-DFE0-4DF2-AF81-EA405966A23B
canada.com, Canada's most comprehensive Internet network and portal Canadian Press
Search for vaccine against killer African cattle disease could fight AIDS By Susan Linnee, Associated Press NAIROBI (AP) - The results of trials underway in Kenya to come up with a vaccine against East Coast fever, a major killer of cattle in eastern Africa, could provide insights into the development of vaccines against human diseases also caused by the invasion of healthy cells, the International Livestock Research Institute said Wednesday. If field tests of three antigens result in "something significant," when their outcome is made public on Oct. 9, a multinational pharmaceutical company and the University of Oxford in Britain will join forces to provide technologies for affordable vaccine delivery in animals in East Africa, Susan MacMillan, ILRI spokeswoman, said. Evans Taracha, a Kenyan scientist leading the ILRI team working on the experimental vaccines, told the 15th International Genome Sequencing and Analysis Conference in Savannah, Georgia, on Tuesday that a research program combining genomics, immunology and vaccine development laid the foundation for developing the vaccine. East Coast fever is spread by blood-sucking ticks bearing parasites that invade the healthy white blood cells of cattle. The disease costs an estimated $300 million US a year in a region where cattle are central to the livelihood of millions of traditional herders. Researchers at the Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland, known as TIGR, led the decoding of the genome of the Theileria parva parasite to produce its genetic blueprint. The resulting DNA data was interpreted by TIGR and ILRI scientists. Scientists from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, the Ludwig Cancer Research Institute in Brussels and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute all contributed to the research that resulted in the testing of the vaccine in Kenya. Diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS are also caused by organisms that invade the hosts' healthy cells. "Medical researchers cannot test this whole genome approach to vaccines against human disease quickly because they have to be much more careful in their experiments with people," MacMillan said. "The cattle researchers in Africa can quickly take the genome approach to vaccine development to find a potential vaccine and to understand a major disease better." Most malaria vaccine research, for example, has been done in mice, and researchers then have to try to compare those results with what the experimental vaccine would do in humans. Dr. Richard Bishop, a British molecular biologist at ILRI, called East Coast fever "a superb if unusual model" for medical research because "it offers new ways to identify the molecules of cell-invading pathogens that stimulate a particular group of white blood cells, known as killer T cells, crucial to the development of immunity against many diseases, including malaria and TB." ILRI, based in Nairobi and in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is one of 16 research centres in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, or CGIAR, co-sponsored by the World Bank, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization and the UN Development Program. © Copyright 2003 The Canadian Press |
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