Research Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the development of pseudo virus-based neutralization assays (PBNA) for diagnosing COVID-19 infection from convalescent patients and assessing the efficacy of various novel vaccine formulations. Foot and mouth disease (FMD) is a highly economically devastating epidemic affecting up to 70 domesticated and wild species. Vaccination with inactivated multivalent vaccine is widely used in endemic countries, but immunity is short-lived and requires recurrent booster vaccination. Virus neutralization assays are considered the best method to measure neutralizing antibody titre as a correlate of protection. However, the virus neutralization assay requires handling highly infectious and contagious wild type viruses, which can only be handled in a Biosafety Level (BsL) 3 or 4 laboratory. Veterinarians depend on few laboratories with BsL 2/3/4 available in their country to determine neutralizing antibodies in the serum of vaccinated animals. There is a pressing need for an alternate diagnostic method that could be performed in a laboratory with basic cell culture facilities. The proposal aims to develop and evaluate a novel, easy, safe, versatile, sensitive, and accessible serotype-specific pseudo virus-based neutralization assay for FMD diagnosis, similar to classical serum neutralization assays. This method would have the potential to hasten FMD diagnosis and reduce economic loss through exportation, disease control and surveillance, and recognition of disease-free status.