Athens, Georgia, U.S.A.-based animal research company Dalan Animal Health has made a major breakthrough in shrimp immunity that it says could revolutionize the aquaculture industry.
Shrimp were previously considered impossible to vaccinate against common diseases, because they possess only a rudimentary immune system. Unlike the human immune system, shrimp only possess an “innate” immune system, which always responds to all pathogens similarly instead of adapting to new threats.
Scientists had long believed it was impossible to use vaccinations on animals who only have innate immune systems, because their immune responses could not learn to recognize new pathogens. Dalan said it has proved otherwise, showing that targeted vaccination of female animals with innate immune systems can pass immunity onto their offspring.
"For decades, disease prevention has focused on the adaptive immune system. We are changing that paradigm," Dalan Animal Health CEO Dr. Annette Kleiser said in a company release. "Our research proves that innate immunity can be trained, offering a revolutionary new way to protect animals, ecosystems, and the global food supply."
The breakthrough all started with honeybees. Dalial Freitak, one of the company’s founders and its Chief Scientific Officer, was working at the University of Graz, in Austria, when her research showed that though honeybees lacked an innate immune system, they had a specific immune-priming protein. She hypothesized that this immune-priming mechanism could allow them to be vaccinated, and proposed an experiment to attempt a prenatal vaccination. This was achieved through feeding an inactive version of a bacteria to a colony queen, who then distributed the vaccine in her eggs.
“I stumbled across [Freitak’s] idea in 2018,” Kleiser, a scientist and biotech entrepreneur, told SeafoodSource. At the time, Kleiser was working for the University of Helsinki in Finland, helping to assess startups that might be suitable for commercialization.
“I was like, somebody needs to do this. This is amazing,” Kleiser said of Freitack’s hypothesis that honeybees could be prenatally vaccinated. “I decided to start the company myself and get it off the ground.”
The approach used in Freitak’s research is essentially a traditional approach to vaccination, Kleiser said.
“You take the pathogen that causes the disease, in our case it was a bacterial disease that affects honeybees around the world. We took a high sample from the infected hive, grew up the bacteria inactivated, and then we fed it to the queen bee,” Kleiser said. “Then, the queen passes the vaccine into her ovaries, where the developing larvae, the next generation, will be exposed to a piece of this dead bug and start mounting an immune response, which will then protect them once they hatch.”
The honeybee vaccine tests were successful at protecting colonies from American Foulbrood, a disease which has decimated honeybee populations worldwide, and the company received conditional regulatory approval from the USDA to use the new technique in 2023. Kleiser said the new vaccine is the same as any livestock vaccine, and regulated as such.
“We know that vaccines are extremely effective in preventing and containing the spread of diseases, and [bees] are extremely important to our survival, to our food security,” she said. “It’s not just a feel good issue, because we all like bees. They’re really critical for feeding the world.”
Dalan Animal Health has so far dosed over 30,000 colonies in the U.S. and Canada with its vaccine.
Following their successful honeybee vaccine, Freitak and Kleiser hypothesized the same mechanism of maternal genetic transfer would exist in shrimp, and they started testing vaccines on female shrimp broodstock. Kleiser said they were unprepared for the striking positive results of their experiments. …
