In West Virginia, Shivappa found that 43 percent of rainbow trout fry, which had been immersed for five hours in holding tanks with the vaccine, were cross-protected against a heterologous virus challenge. He conducted the experiments at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Fish Health Research Laboratory in Kearneysville.
Vakharia told the symposium, "these results are good, but we still have not optimized the dose of the vaccine." Vakharia's team cloned genes of the virus that produce the proteins, which make up its outer, spherical coat. The virus-like particles are thus hollow spheres that resemble the scaffolding of the virus but it cannot reproduce and cause disease.
With strong growth in recent years, salmon aquaculture has surfaced as a $4.9 billion dollar industry that produces 1.6 million metric tons of fish globally, reported in the Review of the State of World Aquaculture, Fisheries, 2003, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. But viral diseases can devastate a commercial operation. Norway, for example, the world leader in salmon production, reports an annual loss to IPNV disease in excess of $60 million.
UMBI has filed a patent application for the IPNV vaccine that will soon be available for licensing. For information on licensing technology, please contact Rita Khanna, Director of Technology Transfer at khannar@umbi.umd.edu or 410-385-6324.
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Contact: Steve Berberich
berberic@umbi.umd.edu
301-932-4804
University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute
27-Apr-2003