Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus vaccine does not fit in classical vaccinology

ABSTRACT

All vaccines are developed to elicit an effective immune response in vaccinated animals such as innate, humoral and cell mediated response to protect animal health. Quality and intensity of the immune responses are differing by characteristics of the vaccine formulation and nature of the infectious agent. Modified live virus vaccines showed advantages over killed vaccines in terms of rapid immune response, duration of the immunity and better cell mediated protection mechanism. The porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is relatively newly emerging (1986 in United States, 1990 in Europe) viral pathogen in pigs and tremendous effort has been made to protect pigs from this economically devastating disease such as developing killed, modified live, recombinant protein based and DNA vaccines. However, only cell culture attenuated virus vaccine is practiced with arguably limited efficacy. The PRRSV vaccine did not clear virus from infected pigs nor prevent re-infection of the virus. The vaccine showed very limited innate immune response, low anamnestic immune response and negligible cell mediated immune response. Despite of the current developed scientific technology, there still remain many questions to solve a most important pig disease worldwide.