Elanco teams with Medgene to commercialize pathogenic avian influenza vaccine

Vaccine for dairy cattle designed to slow spread of avian flu (H5N1).

cow art for bird fluarticle.jpg — *Credit: SimonSkafar / E+ / Getty Images*

In late February, Elanco Animal Health Inc. (ELAN) announced a new agreement with South Dakota-based Medgene to leverage the company's innovative vaccine platform technology. The agreement includes commercialization of a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) vaccine for use in dairy cattle.

Medgene reports the vaccine has met all requirements of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) platform technology guidelines and is in the final stages of review for conditional license approval.

While the poultry industry has developed interventions and processes to reduce the spread or eradicate HPAI, those efforts remain challenging as the current outbreak enters its fourth year. Dairy producers have worked quickly to protect their herds without the same tools and biosecurity options to tackle this devastating disease.

Since March 2004, nearly 1,000 dairy herds across the U.S. have been stricken with cross-species transmission, along with zoonotic transmission to people, demonstrating that more interventions are quickly needed. This virus is prevalent and predicted to persist over time, thus a cattle vaccine will be critical to slow virus spread between birds and cattle, the company says.

"As egg prices soar and milk production wanes in infected dairies, the need for new solutions to curb disease spread is evident," says Jeff Simmons, President and CEO of Elanco Animal Health, Greenfield, Ind. “Elanco is pleased to partner with Medgene to bring customers options to fight this devastating disease and believes this product will become part of a routine vaccination protocol for the U.S. dairy industry. This partnership further strengthens our diverse dairy portfolio and advances our One Health platform of animal health solutions, not only benefiting our dairy customers, but helping curb disease spread for our poultry customers, and working to improve egg prices for consumers."

Medgene CEO Mark Luecke added: "Medgene has an established reputation of supporting animal owners and their veterinarians with our USDA-licensed platform technology and bioinformatics software to design transformational vaccines. With our critically important H5N1 vaccine for dairy cattle in the final stages of approval, we're excited to partner with Elanco to quickly bring this much needed solution to U.S. dairies.”

The USDA previously approved Medgene's vaccine platform technology in cattle, allowing the company to accelerate H5N1 vaccine development. Medgene notes that it has the existing vaccine manufacturing supply ready to deploy to help protect U.S. dairy herds.