Biotechnology for animal health


Biotechnology is making an increasing contribution to the Global Animal Health (AH) field in the areas of vaccine development, diagnostics and biopharmaceuticals. The Global AH market was worth $23 billion in 2013 and includes products for both livestock and companion animals with relative sales being split 60/40 between these species. The market is also split between pharmaceuticals (62%), biologicals (26%) and medicinal feed additives (12%).
(Animal Pharm, May 2014)

While traditional vaccines are still produced by culture of the pathogen followed by inactivation of the agent, an increasing number of vaccines use recombinant antigens, molecularly attenuated live viruses or deletion mutants. With the need to sometimes be able to differentiate between vaccinated and infected animals, marker genes are also now being inserted into viral vaccines to allow for this discrimination.

In the area of diagnostics, recombinant proteins provides a reliable sources of antigens for diagnostic assays and polymerase chain reactions( PCR) based assays are now used routinely due to their exquisite sensitivity and improved specificity. This is particularly important to Australian Agriculture due to our freedom from many of the worst diseases of livestock, such as foot and mouth disease.

Biopharmaceutical are becoming increasingly important for AH to improve the productivity and welfare of animals. While recombinant proteins have been used for many years we are now seeing peptide based products and monoclonal antibody technology becoming available for treatment in multiple species. The ability to rapidly speciate monoclonal antibodies and improvements in mammalian production systems, means that these types of therapeutics that are routinely used in humans can be made available for use in multiple veterinary species.

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