Key result
Foot-and-mouth subunit vaccines show pre-clinical immunogenicity but lack complete cross-protection and field validation.
Why the study?
Shortcomings of traditional inactivated vaccines for foot-and-mouth disease, including short immunity, manufacturing biosecurity concerns, antigenic breakdown, and lack of cross-serotype coverage, have motivated the development of subunit vaccines.
Subunit vaccines represent a promising, safer alternative to traditional FMD vaccines, but require further development in multivalent design and antigen stabilization to achieve sustainable disease control.
Subunit FMD vaccines merit further optimization; leaves open cross-protection and field efficacy before any practice shift.
Foot -and-mouth disease (FMD) is a transboundary viral disease that is highly contagious and seriously affects the livestock productivity, food security, and international trade. Even though the traditional inactivated vaccines have long been used over decades, their shortcomings such as relatively short immunity, biosecurity concerns during manufacturing, antigenic breakdown, and the lack of cross-serotype coverage limit their efficacy in the long term. The difficulties have led to the creation of subunit vaccines as the safer and more carefully designed alternatives.Subunit vaccines are, first of all, designed based on structural capsid proteins, in particular, VP1, or are prepared as virus-like particles (VLPs) to resemble the native virion structure, but without infectious genetic material. Immunogenicity has been significantly increased with the development of novel systems of recombinant expression, multi-epitope designing techniques based on immunoinformatics, nanoparticle delivery systems, and optimization of adjuvant.Though pre-clinical results have been encouraging, some problems have been noted including incomplete cross-protection and small scale field validation. Further development of multivalent design, antigen stabilisation, and new delivery methods is needed in order to attain sustainable and successful control of FMD
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Sada et al. (2026) conducted a review in Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). Subunit vaccines vs. Traditional inactivated vaccines was evaluated. Subunit vaccines against foot-and-mouth disease show encouraging pre-clinical immunogenicity but require further development to overcome incomplete cross-protection and limited field validation.
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