Pirbright awarded £2.4m to develop Nipah vaccine
17th Aug 2017 / By Alistair Driver
A grant worth £2.4 million has been awarded to the Pirbright Institute to lead an international team developing a vaccine to protect pigs against Nipah virus (NiV).
The grant, awarded by Innovate UK, will allow scientists from Pirbright and partners in the UK, Australia, Malaysia and India to develop a prototype vaccine that will aid the control of NiV outbreaks.
NiV is usually found in Old World fruit bats, but infection in pigs increases the ability for the virus to transmit to humans and cause severe, often fatal, neurological disease. In the late nineties, pig-to-human transmission created the first and most devastating NiV outbreaks in Malaysia and Singapore, causing over 100 human fatalities.
For more on this story, see Pig World