New guidelines for the pathological assessment of African swine fever infections
African swine fever is still one of the major viral swine diseases for which a commercial vaccine is lacking. Researchers of CReSA have presented guidelines to integrate relevant pathological findings of the disease with virological and immunological data.
These guidelines will facilitate the global interpretation of future experiments of African swine fever virus (ASFV)-related vaccinology.
Researchers of CReSA have taken advantage of their unique biosecurity level 3 (BSL-3) facilities to experimentally infect pigs with highly virulent strains, thus facilitating a complete readout of the outcoming data. A guiding to improve data collection and analysis from these experiments is here presented.
The main objectives of this guideline is to:
- Briefly contextualize the clinical and pathological ASFV presentations focusing on points that are critical for pathogenesis;
- Provide recommendations concerning the analysis of clinical, gross and microscopic observations;
- Standardize the pathological report, the terminology employed and the evaluation of the severity of the lesions between the ASFV research groups for comparing inter-group data;
- Complement this data with virological and immunological data.
This information may be of special interests for researchers focused on ASFV vaccine development. For the design and development of preventive products, the researchers need standardized challenge protocols and well characterized clinical, pathological and immunological responses of inbreed and outbreed pigs to different viral strains and vaccine-like products. The different approaches used should be assessed by immunologist, virologist and pathologist expertise.
- This work has been fully supported by the AGL2010-22229-C03-01 project from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spanish Government).
- This methodology has been published in:
Galindo-Cardiel I, Ballester M, Solanes D, Nofrarías M, López-Soria S, Argilaguet JM, Lacasta A, Accensi F, Rodríguez F, Segalés J. Standardization of pathological investigations in the framework of experimental ASFV infections. Virus Res. 2013 Apr;173(1):180-90.
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About the principal investigator of this research line at CReSA:
Dr. Fernando Rodríguez González Coordinator of the research line on Pathogenesis and profilaxis of Asfavirus infections E-mail: fernando.rodriguez@cresa.uab.cat Phone nº: +34 93 581 45 62; Fax: +34 93 581 44 90 Edifici CReSA. Campus UAB 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona) Spain
