Basis of protective immunity and reversion to virulence of african swine fever virus

Project summary

ASFV has become the major animal pandemic worldwide, spreading across Europe currently affecting 14 EU countries including Italy, Sweden, Croatia or Greece. From China, where it is endemic, ASFV has spread to most Southeast Asia countries. The virus crossed the Ocean in 2021 and reached the Domini-can Republic and Haiti, seriously threatening the whole America. Knowledge of the immune mechanisms leading to a protective response, which is the basis for rational vaccine design, is still uncertain.

The scientific and technological advances that constitute the ambition of this project focus on the generation of data and tools to understand ASFV virulence mechanisms and its relationship with the host immunity leading to a protective response. The innovation potential of IMM4ASF starts with the knowledge gained from the previous ICRAD consortium, IFNASF, identifying regulatory ASFV genes and virulence factors. In this project, recombinant ASFV lacking immunomodulatory genes (CSIC), or recombinant MVA encoding those genes (LMU), will be generated and tested in vitro to characterize their immune potential and hemoadsorbent ability, and in vivo (IZSUM) to analyze their virulence and potential protective ability. In order to understand the immune response involved in preventing ASFV infec-tion, cutting-edge technology such as RNA-seq, combined with single-cell-RNA-seq (scRNA-Seq) (SVA) is planned. Finally, issues largely ignored but relevant to allow vaccines commercialization, such as the reversion to virulence of live attenuated vaccines, will be addressed. IMMASF is a four-actor consortium (CSIC, LMU, IZSUM, SVA), driven EUPAHW action to improve the European research on the molecular and immunological knowledge on ASFV/ host interaction and vaccine development. All the partners are fully committed with this new project and have the expertise and the methodology to efficiently join this action.