Research Team Manager (acting):
Dr Mirinda van Kleef
Tel: +27-12-529 9385
Fax: +27-12-529 9310
Vaccination has, over the years, proven to be an eminently
successful means of controlling animal disease. Despite successes in controlling
and stamping out of diseases, traditional veterinary vaccines do not always
protect efficiently, are often expensive to produce or their effective use may
require involved and often impractical immunisation schedules. This research
programme attempts where possible to use a rational approach based on a
fundamental knowledge of the target’s interactions with the immune system to
develop a new generation of veterinary vaccines based not on the whole organism,
but on its antigenically important components. Although its main focus is now on
novel vaccine development, the programme also plays an important role in
identifying and developing new immunoassays reagents and methods; since
antigenicity is operationally defined by an interaction with the immune system,
the search for vaccine targets can often identify antigens or epitopes that
might also be useful as diagnostic targets. The Programme’s outputs are provided
by the collective activities of a number of individual units or laboratories,
each of which has its own research agenda.
Focus Areas
