Algae for fish vaccine
The business Model
An Irish company is creating a platform algal and oral vaccine delivery technology to eliminate the use of harmful antibiotics in the fish we eat.
Aquaculture or fish farming is worth as much as $200bn globally and €149m in Ireland. Approximately 5% of the world’s fish stock is lost to infectious disease at a cost of more than $10bn annually. The way the industry does disease management for most aquaculture farms is that antibiotics are used excessively, ending up in food and ultimately in the diets of people or expelled as effluents into the environment.
The innovation can reduce or eliminate the use of antibiotics, reduce fish mortality rates in aquaculture farms, prevent bacterial and viral diseases from wiping out entire fish stocks, and improve global food security.
The microalgal oral vaccines can be mixed with fishmeal and fed to the fish, mimicking the natural feeding process. The natural digestion process of the fish unlocks the vaccine and triggers an immune response. In addition, because the vaccine is inside the microalgae chloroplast, it is protected by a rigid cell wall and is stable in harsh environmental conditions.
By using microalgae as an oral delivery vehicle, the labour and post-processing production costs can be substantially reduced, allowing to produce effective vaccines that are much more affordable and user-friendly.
Aquaculture farmers will get immensely benefited with this new technology as conventional vaccine technologies such as injection vaccines are labour and cost intensive. While salmon, trout and sea-bass farmers can justify the cost of injection vaccines, it is impractical for high volume, low-value sea food farmers such as tilapia, carp, cat-fish and shrimp which account for 80% of the sea food farmed globally.
Industrial benefits
As fish farming continues to expand and intensify, the frequency and severity of disease outbreaks will increase if effective control measures such as vaccination are not in place. Disease can be catastrophic for the industry viability as high mortality rates ultimately lead to severe financial losses, site closures and redundancies.
This is currently causing approximately $10bn losses in aquaculture.
Developing an oral antigen delivery technology would address many of the problems associated with IP injection with the potential to:
Decrease the costs of fish vaccination,
Expand the window for vaccination,
Reduce losses associated with side effects and/or opportunistic infections, and as a result.
Improve animal welfare.
The current technology is still at validation stage. However, it is very clear that success of this project will help aquaculture farmers in several ways:
Reduced labour cost for vaccine administration
Reduced use of expensive antibiotics
Vaccine formulated in feed, so easy handling and dosage of vaccine
Micro-algae are natural source of feed for many fishes, which makes it a palatable vaccine
Maintain water quality (excessive antibiotic usage reduces water quality), which reduces the risk of outburst of diseases.
Reduce the risk of new antibiotic resistant diseases
Increase profitability due to reduced mortality rate and increased yields of high-quality fish.
Thanks to major advances in algal genomics and molecular biology, microalgae can be engineered to express inexpensive therapeutic proteins and vaccines of economic value. The cost of the synthetic biology tools has dropped, allowing effective vaccines that are much more affordable and user-friendly.
