China’s Promising African Swine Fever Vaccine Candidate Enters Next Stage of Trials

A Chinese vaccine candidate for African swine fever, the highly infectious and lethal disease that has decimated the country’s vast swine herds in recent years, will advance to expanded clinical and production trials after performing well in earlier tests.

The vaccine, developed by top animal disease research body the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute (HVRI), showed positive results in intermediate-stage trials and is expected to undergo large-scale testing soon, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said Tuesday in a statement (link in Chinese).

Progress on the vaccine has been closely watched by China’s pork industry as there is no currently available cure or vaccine for the fever despite decades of research.

An epidemic of the disease, which kills almost all the pigs it infects but isn’t known to harm humans, began in China in 2018 and lasted more than a year. Over that period, hog herds were decimated in the world’s biggest consumer and producer of pork, shaking global agricultural markets.

In China, both the industry and its customers have suffered, as a shortage of the country’s favorite meat has pushed up inflation. Pork prices in China rose 85.7% year-on-year in July, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. That was actually down from the peak, when prices more than doubled year-on-year.

Scientists worldwide have been racing to build the world’s first vaccine for the disease. In January, the U.S. government claimed to have developed a 100% effective vaccine, though more work needs to be done before it can be commercialized.

HVRI, under the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, is the first body to get this far with a vaccine in China. Bu Zhigao, HVRI’s director, told Caixin previously that bringing an African swine fever vaccine to market could take anywhere from six months to several years.

Previous trials were carried out in stages from April to June on 3,000 pigs in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, the central province of Henan and the far west Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, said CAAS President Tang Huajun.

More than 80% of the vaccinated pigs showed immune responses to the virus in a laboratory setting, Tang said.

Piglets and sows were given the vaccine at 10 and 100 times the proposed immunization dose and were then observed for 20 weeks. None of them showed any abnormal symptoms nor signs of damage.

The agriculture ministry said in its statement that CAAS will “accelerate productive tests and studies of the vaccine” and “expand the clinical trials to finish related trials as soon as possible.”

If the final trials go well, the vaccine will still need regulatory approval before it can come into use.

Contact editor Joshua Dummer (joshuadummer@caixin.com)

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