Animal Bioterrorism
When disease threatens our food chain, time is of the essence. The diagnosis is critical. There are financial, economic, and safety implications. A single carrier can result in a substandard quality product, infect many other valuable farm animals, affect multiple industries of entire regions and eventually the health, safety and economic stability of the United States.
In the past, naturally occurring diseases have affected tens of thousands of farms and nearly crippled the economies of countries. Today, we are vulnerable to the very real threat of a terrorist attack by the intentional spread of pathogenic microorganisms. An animal bioterrorism attack is not a matter of if, but when.
Early detection of an engineered disease outbreak will be critical. Unfortunately, the animals can’t communicate their symptoms or even tell whether they are sick at all. The need for innovative, fast, on-site diagnostic technology is evident to preserve the health of valuable farm animals and to ensure that appropriate therapeutic and containment efforts can be initiated.
AAD believes that the best way to address the threat of bioterrorism in animal agriculture is to create a decentralized, point-of-care, diagnostic network. Such a network will provide the means to quickly determine, on-site, when a herd of animals has been exposed to specific pathogens and to relay that information to a monitoring center to initiate appropriate therapeutic and containment efforts. AAD believes that, for the long term, the practical solution in a farm environment is to rely on the complete response of the animal’s own immune system to tell us it has been attacked directly at the point-of-care.
The race is on to develop a rapid, sensitive, and specific early-detection technology. Advanced Animal Diagnostics has submitted funding proposals to provide the focus to create the decentralized diagnostic network by further expanding the capabilities of the Universal Diagnostic Platform, UDP™. Our research will provide the means to quickly determine, on-site, when a herd of animals has been exposed to specific pathogens.
The research to date has demonstrated that the UDP™ can measure the basic inflammatory cell response and the antibody immune response. AAD will expand on that demonstrated capability by measuring, on-site, the cell-mediated immune response. To this end, AAD is involved in a research and development collaboration with Synergy Vaccines to develop a more sensitive and efficient generation of biosensors.
Broader Impact
The direct application of this technology is as a diagnostic tool to help combat agricultural bioterrorism. However, the impact of our technology is broader and goes beyond homeland security. Because of the special requirements of on-site farm testing our research constitutes a shift in veterinary methodologies, away from classical or DNA-based microbiology and cell surface antibody-based flow cytometry to an emphasis on minute in vitro, chemical, cytochemical and morphological cellular changes of the animals own immune response as a way to identify exposure to infectious organisms.