Plum Island.
It sounds like a quaint vacation spot — but some of the deadliest animal diseases ever known are its only residents.
Plum Island Animal Disease Center has been operating there for more than 65 years, bringing scientists together to research things like foot-and-mouth disease and African swine fever (ASF) — a virus that kills almost 100% of infected pigs.
Less than 2 miles from the coast of Long Island, the highly secured 840-acre facility houses the only lab in the nation that’s allowed to work with live strains of the ASF virus.
It’s not your typical office — or your typical commute — with researchers taking government-run ferries to and from the island every day.
“When we go to work and we go into the lab, we take off everything that we weren’t born with and we walk through a doorway into a locker room where we put on scrubs for the day,” ASF researcher Douglas Gladue told Michigan Farm News.
“At the end of the day, we shower and go back to the locker room where we put on our clothes. It’s that type of facility.”
Welcome to the frontline.
Too close to home
Draw a 1,500-mile line directly south from Plum Island and you’ll find the Dominican Republic, an island that’s experiencing the first outbreak of ASF in the Western hemisphere in more than 40 years.
First detected in late July, the outbreak has since crossed the border into neighboring Haiti, just 700 miles from Miami.
Tens of thousands of pigs have already been sent to slaughter in the Dominican Republic because of the disease, with officials estimating nearly $180 million in total losses.
Still, it pales in comparison to the catastrophic outbreak that killed roughly half of China’s pig population in 2018 and 2019. It’s estimated that as many 200 million pigs died or were culled in the aftermath, causing more than $112 billion in damages.
While there have not been any ASF cases in the United States, it’s estimated that a national outbreak could cost at least $14 billion over two years, and $50 billion over 10 years.
“It is imperative that researchers continue to move forward in the development of a vaccine and that animal health officials work diligently in the approval process,” said Ernie Birchmeier, Michigan Farm Bureau livestock specialist.
“ASF is a terrible disease that can have a devastating impact on our pig population and cause severe economic impact on our pork producers. In this time of unprecedented supply chain issues, we can ill afford to have a disease causing further damage and concern.”
For the researchers at Plum Island, the stakes are high — as are the challenges.
“The virus is extremely complex,” said ASF researcher Manuel Borca, whose team works alongside Gladue’s — totaling seven scientists.
“There are a lot of proteins in the virus and there are a lot of genes that are encoded by the genome of the virus and we don’t know in most of the cases what are the function of each of these proteins. We actually know probably no more than 20% or 30% of those proteins in terms of what is their role and what is their function of those proteins in immunity.”
A breakthrough
In late September — just two months after the ASF outbreak in the Dominican Republic — USDA’s Animal Research Service made an announcement that turned heads around the world.
One of its ASF vaccine candidates developed at Plum Island had been shown to prevent and effectively protect both European- and Asian-bred swine against the Asian strain of the virus that’s currently circulating.
It’s a breakthrough decades in the making.
Research on ASF vaccines started on Plum Island in the 1980s, then shut down in the early 2000s. When an outbreak of the disease hit the Republic of Georgia in 2007, ARS reopened the research.
The new vaccine candidate — known as I177L — is the fourth experimental ASF vaccine engineered at Plum Island and licensed to pharmaceutical companies to develop further.
But this one is special.
“We are very, very happy with this candidate,” Borca said.
“When we used the I177L vaccine in the right way, it produced solid protection and the challenge virus appears to not even replicate in these animals.”
Researchers found immunity in roughly one-third of pigs two weeks after receiving the vaccine, with full protection in all the animals being achieved by the fourth week.
Even better, the vaccine candidate works at a very low dose, but even at a higher dose it still isn’t toxic to the animal.
“We applaud the efforts to this point and strongly encourage all to work together to cross the finish line,” Birchmeier added.
Moving forward
So, when will an ASF vaccine be mass produced and rolled out to farms? Much like the vaccine research itself, the answer is tricky.
“I think that we can say that we’re making progress,” Gladue said.
“We don’t give specific timeframes because a lot of things are out of our control with what commercial vaccine companies do and regulatory authorities in each country and what they’re going to require and how it’s going to be deployed.”
Gladue said the best way to prevent a disease from coming into a country is to control the disease in other countries — or maybe even eradicate it in some areas.
“So, in areas such as Asia where there are a lot of ASF outbreaks that have been continuously going on, a vaccine candidate like this will probably come to market sooner,” he added.
While pork producers around the world wait for that to happen, the researchers who have spent a decade of their lives working toward an ASF vaccine are waiting too.
Waiting to see if it all pays off.
“This is something that not all scientists have the lick of feeling because sometimes it never happens in the life of the researcher,” Borca said.
Building on the work of more than 30 people over the course of 41 years, there’s hope on the island’s horizon.
“It’s every scientist’s dream to see their research turn into a product or make an impact in science, and for us, if this becomes a successfully commercialized vaccine that changes the current state of ASF in the world, that would be the ultimate goal,” Gladue said.
“That’s the ultimate dream.”