Time-course of antibody and cell-mediated immune responses to Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome virus under field conditions

The Swine IFN System in Viral Infections: Major Advances and Translational Prospects

Interferons (IFNs) are a family of cytokines that play a pivotal role in orchestrating the innate immune response during viral infections, thus representing the first line of defense in the host. After binding to their respective receptors, they are able to elicit a plethora of biological activities, by initiating signaling cascades which lead to the transcription of genes involved in antiviral, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory and antitumoral effector mechanisms. In hindsight, it is not surprising that viruses have evolved multiple IFN escape strategies toward efficient replication in the host. Hence, in order to achieve insight into preventive and treatment strategies, it is essential to explore the mechanisms underlying the IFN response to viral infections and the constraints thereof. Accordingly, this review is focused on three RNA and three DNA viruses of major importance in the swine farming sector, aiming to provide essential data as to how the IFN system modulates the antiviral immune response, and is affected by diverse, virus-driven, immune escape mechanisms.

Reappraisal of PRRS Immune Control Strategies: The Way Forward

The control of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) is still a major issue worldwide in the pig farming sector. Despite extensive research efforts and the practical experience gained so far, the syndrome still severely affects farmed pigs worldwide and challenges established beliefs in veterinary virology and immunology. The clinical and economic repercussions of PRRS are based on concomitant, additive features of the virus pathogenicity, host susceptibility, and the influence of environmental, microbial, and non-microbial stressors. This makes a case for integrated, multi-disciplinary research efforts, in which the three types of contributing factors are critically evaluated toward the development of successful disease control strategies. These efforts could be significantly eased by the definition of reliable markers of disease risk and virus pathogenicity. As for the host's susceptibility to PRRSV infection and disease onset, the roles of both the innate and adaptive immune responses are still ill-defined. In particular, the overt discrepancy between passive and active immunity and the uncertain role of adaptive immunity vis-à-vis established PRRSV infection should prompt the scientific community to develop novel research schemes, in which apparently divergent and contradictory findings could be reconciled and eventually brought into a satisfactory conceptual framework.

Selection and Misclassification Biases in Longitudinal Studies

Using imperfect tests may lead to biased estimates of disease frequency and measures of association. Many studies have looked into the effect of misclassification on statistical inferences. These evaluations were either within a cross-sectional study framework, assessing biased prevalence, or for cohort study designs, evaluating biased incidence rate or risk ratio estimates based on misclassification at one of the two time-points (initial assessment or follow-up). However, both observations at risk and incident cases can be wrongly identified in longitudinal studies, leading to selection and misclassification biases, respectively. The objective of this paper was to evaluate the relative impact of selection and misclassification biases resulting from misclassification, together, on measures of incidence and risk ratio. To investigate impact on measure of disease frequency, data sets from a hypothetical cohort study with two samples collected one month apart were simulated and analyzed based on specific test and disease characteristics, with no elimination of disease during the sampling interval or clustering of observations. Direction and magnitude of bias due to selection, misclassification, and total bias was assessed for diagnostic test sensitivity and specificity ranging from 0.7 to 1.0 and 0.8 to 1.0, respectively, and for specific disease contexts, i.e., disease prevalences of 5 and 20%, and disease incidences of 0.01, 0.05, and 0.1 cases/animal-month. A hypothetical exposure with known strength of association was also generated. A total of 1,000 cohort studies of 1,000 observations each were simulated for these six disease contexts where the same diagnostic test was used to identify observations at risk at beginning of the cohort and incident cases at its end. Our results indicated that the departure of the estimates of disease incidence and risk ratio from their true value were mainly a function of test specificity, and disease prevalence and incidence. The combination of the two biases, at baseline and follow-up, revealed the importance of a good to excellent specificity relative to sensitivity for the diagnostic test. Small divergence from perfect specificity extended quickly to disease incidence over-estimation as true prevalence increased and true incidence decreased. A highly sensitive test to exclude diseased subjects at baseline was of less importance to minimize bias than using a highly specific one at baseline. Near perfect diagnostic test attributes were even more important to obtain a measure of association close to the true risk ratio, according to specific disease characteristics, especially its prevalence. Low prevalent and high incident disease lead to minimal bias if disease is diagnosed with high sensitivity and close to perfect specificity at baseline and follow-up. For more prevalent diseases we observed large risk ratio biases towards the null value, even with near perfect diagnosis.

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus vaccine does not fit in classical vaccinology

All vaccines are developed to elicit an effective immune response in vaccinated animals such as innate, humoral and cell mediated response to protect animal health. Quality and intensity of the immune responses are differing by characteristics of the vaccine formulation and nature of the infectious agent. Modified live virus vaccines showed advantages over killed vaccines in terms of rapid immune response, duration of the immunity and better cell mediated protection mechanism. The porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is relatively newly emerging (1986 in United States, 1990 in Europe) viral pathogen in pigs and tremendous effort has been made to protect pigs from this economically devastating disease such as developing killed, modified live, recombinant protein based and DNA vaccines. However, only cell culture attenuated virus vaccine is practiced with arguably limited efficacy. The PRRSV vaccine did not clear virus from infected pigs nor prevent re-infection of the virus. The vaccine showed very limited innate immune response, low anamnestic immune response and negligible cell mediated immune response. Despite of the current developed scientific technology, there still remain many questions to solve a most important pig disease worldwide.

Immune Control of PRRS: Lessons to be Learned and Possible Ways Forward

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) is an elusive model of host/virus relationship in which disease is determined by virus pathogenicity, pig breed susceptibility and phenotype, microbial infectious pressure, and environmental conditions. The disease can be controlled by farm management programs, which can be supported by vaccination or conditioning of animals to circulating PRRS virus (PRRSV) strains. Yet, PRRS still represents a cause of heavy losses for the pig industry worldwide. Immunological control strategies are often compounded by poor and late development of adaptive immunity in both vaccinated and infected animals. Also, there is evidence that results of field trials can be worse than those of experimental studies in isolation facilities. Neutralizing antibody (NA) was shown to prevent PRRSV infection. Instead, the role of NA and adaptive immunity on the whole in virus clearance after established PRRSV infections is still contentious. Pigs eventually eliminate PRRSV infection, which may be correlated with an “educated,” innate immune response, which may also develop following vaccination. In addition to vaccination, an immunomodulation strategy for PRRS can be reasonably advocated in pig “problem” farms, where a substantial control of disease prevalence and disease-related losses is badly needed. This is not at odds with vaccination, which should be preferably restricted to PRRSV-free animals bound for PRRSV-infected farm units. Oral, low-dose, interferon-α treatments proved effective on farm for the control of respiratory and reproductive disease outbreaks, whereas the results were less clear in isolation facilities. Having in mind the crucial interaction between PRRSV and bacterial lipopolysaccharides for occurrence of respiratory disease, the strong control actions of low-dose type I interferons on the inflammatory response observed in vitro and in vivo probably underlie the rapid clinical responses observed in field trials.