Several of the Poultry CRC’s research projects have wrapped up recently, including Professor Glenn Browning’s projects on Chicken Anaemia Virus vaccines at The University of Melbourne, CAV vaccines and Genomic approaches to novel vaccines. Glenn has transferred the pre-master seedlot developed during the work to Bioproperties Pty Ltd for assessment as a potential vaccine candidate.
Steve Walkden-Brown’s project on New diagnostics at the University of New England has yielded some potential approaches for the management and control of Marek’s Disease Virus. The CRC is planning a meeting of the research team and a number of eminent scientists with experience in Marek’s disease in early October to determine the best ways to transfer these outcomes to industry. As with some of our other projects, publications in the form of fact sheets or online articles at Poultry Hub will assist in moving the knowledge acquired from the project from the researchers to farmers.
We have completed our project Diagnostics and surveillance of infectious bronchitis, undertaken by Dr Sandra Sapats at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong. Achieving cross-protection against new variant strains by using a combination of existing vaccines has removed the need for a new vaccine at this stage.
Our project on the Oral delivery of antigens at the University of Sydney investigated whether birds could be immunised through vaccines delivered in feed or water. While the project indicated that it might be possible to immunise in this way, we would need to perform more research to validate this method as a potential immunisation system in a commercial setting.
