A review of vaccine development and research for industry animals in Korea

Vaccination has proven to be the most cost-effective strategy for controlling a wide variety of infectious diseases in humans and animals. For the last decade, veterinary vaccines have been substantially developed and demonstrated their effectiveness against many diseases. Nevertheless, new vaccines are greatly demanded to effectively control newly- and re-emerging pathogens in livestock. However, development of veterinary vaccines is a challenging task, in part, due to a variety of pathogens, hosts, and the uniqueness of host-susceptibility to each pathogen. Therefore, novel concepts of vaccines should be explored to overcome the limitation of conventional vaccines. There have been greatly advanced in the completion of genomic sequencing of pathogens, the application of comparative genomic and transcriptome analysis. This would facilitate to open opportunities up to investigate a new generation of vaccines; recombinant subunit vaccine, virus-like particle, DNA vaccine, and vector-vehicle vaccine. Currently, such types of vaccines are being actively explored against various livestock diseases, affording numerous advantages over conventional vaccines, including ease of production, immunogenicity, safety, and multivalency in a single shot. In this articles, the authors present the current status of the development of veterinary vaccines at large as well as research activities conducted in Korea.