VAL new antibodies towards key immune targets in salmonids:
In recent years, aquaculture has expanded significantly and become a major economic sector. In the last two decades, commercial vaccines have become available through research to prevent infectious diseases caused by some pathogens. However there is still a long way to go to develop effective vaccines against other types of pathogens. One of the bottlenecks is lack of immunological assays for the diagnosis and effective monitoring of vaccines performance, which will require high quality monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to measure the host immune response. Immune response elicited by immunoglobulins and cytokines is essential for the host to mount effective and memorable defence against infection. VAL has generated mAbs to key fish (salmonids) immune targets to be used to develop diagnostic and vaccine monitoring assays. These antibodies are specific to; IL22 (2 antibodies), IL21, IL4, IFNγ (3 antibodies as part of TargetFish programme), IFNγ-related, CD4 (2 antibodies), CD3, IgM, IgT (2 antibodies) and IPNV (2 antibodies). These antibodies are currently being validated at the Fish Immunology Research Centre at Aberdeen and will be made available for the scientific community in the near future.
