|
Principal areas of research
Antigenic variation, vaccine strain selection, broader cross-strain protection, DIVA tests, vaccine efficacy.
Biography
David Paton obtained BA (Hons) Natural Sciences and VetMB degrees from the University of Cambridge, UK in 1981 and 1984 respectively, and a PhD degree, from the University of Surrey, UK, in 1992. After three years working in veterinary practice in UK and Australia, he has spent the last 20 years as a veterinary virologist specialising in the epidemiology, diagnosis and control of various viral livestock diseases. He joined the Virology Department of the Central Veterinary Laboratory (later Veterinary Laboratories Agency, VLA). He was for six years secretary of the European Society for Veterinary Virology and became head of the Virology department at VLA in 1998. In 2001, he left VLA to join the Institute for Animal Health (IAH) as head of the department for vesicular disease control that includes the FAO foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) world reference laboratory. The work of the department includes a wide range of strategic and applied research on FMD control including the evaluation of vaccination strategies as well as the development of improved vaccines and vaccine selection methods. In 2007 he was appointed Head of the Epidemiology Division and FMD Programme Manager at IAH.
Research
There is a strong desire to develop vaccination policies for FMD that would reduce reliance on large scale slaughtering of animals. However, vaccinated animals may sometimes become infected without showing signs of disease and pose a risk of starting new outbreaks later on if the virus persists in these animals. Therefore, more effective vaccines are needed to better block virus establishment and that do not induce antibodies against some of the immunogenic viral proteins produced during a wild-type infection. To strengthen the immune response to vaccination, we are investigating vectored FMD vaccines to elicit better cell mediated and mucosal immunity. On diagnostics, we are developing and validating tests that differentiate infection from vaccination including a test for FMD-specific IgA in saliva and alternative format tests for FMD virus non-structural antibody detection. The development and validation of marker vaccines and associated diagnostics will enable animals to be effectively vaccinated without precluding the possibility to detect any vaccinated animals that have become infected and pose a risk for disease spread.
Vaccine selection is also of great importance in FMD control because of the existence of seven different virus serotypes and multiple antigenic subtypes. Current methods rely on serological tests to match vaccine strains to field isolates, but these are slow and depend upon serological reagents that are hard to standardise. Furthermore, there is a paucity of validation of serological matching approaches due to the costs of in vivo cross-protection tests. An alternative approach would be to relate antigenic phenotype to the derived amino acid sequence of viral capsids. Therefore, another focus of our work is the study of epitope conservation and significance in protection, investigated by means of sequence analyses and reverse genetics. Better definition of protective epitopes and their relative conservation may also help to create more broadly protective vaccines.
Finally, we are interested in ways to predict vaccine induced protection. At one level this work is attempting to identify immune correlates and at the population level we are collating data on the ability of vaccination to block viral transmission in order to design optimal vaccination strategies and predict vaccine efficacy in emergency situations.
Key Publications
Paton DJ, Valarcher J-F, Bergmann I, Matlho OG, Zakharov VM, Palma EL, Thomson GR. (2005). Selection of foot-and-mouth disease vaccine strains – a review. OIE Sci et Tech Rev. 24 (3), 981-993.
Paton DJ, De Clercq K, Greiner M, Dekker A, Brocchi E, Bergmann I, Sammin DJ, Fubbins S, Parida S. (2006). Application of non-structural protein antibody tests in substantiating freedom from foot-and-mouth disease virus infection after emergency vaccination of cattle. Vaccine 24, 6503-12.
Parida S, Oh Y, Reid SM, Cox SJ, Statham RJ, Mahapatra M, Anderson J, Barnett PV, Charleston B, Paton, D.J. (2006). Interferon-γ production in vitro from whole blood of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) vaccinated and infected cattle after incubation with inactivated FMDV. Vaccine 24, 964-9.
Parida S, Anderson J, Cox SJ, Barnett PV, Paton DJ. (2006). Secretory IgA as an indicator of oro-pharyngeal foot-and-mouth disease virus replication and as a tool for post vaccination surveillance. Vaccine 24, 1107-1116.
Cottam EM, Haydon DT, Paton DJ, Gloster J, Wilesmith JW, Ferris NP, Hutchings GH, King DP. (2006). Molecular epidemiology of the foot-and-mouth disease virus outbreak in the United Kingdom in 2001. J Virol. 80, 11274-82.
Cox SJ, Voyce C, Parida S, Reid SM, Hamblin PA, Hutchings G, Paton DJ, Barnett PV. (2006). Effect of emergency FMD vaccine antigen payload on protection, sub-clinical infection and persistence following direct contact challenge of cattle. Vaccine 24, 3184-90.
Back to main Investigators page
|
|
