On track to prevent Johne’s disease with drug or vaccine

To date, the only response to Johne’s disease, a debilitating wasting disease in dairy cattle, has been to eliminate affected cows from the herd. But School of Veterinary Medicine researchers are homing in on a way to save the cow by controlling the disease-causing bacteria instead.

It’s not an easy process, but they’ve narrowed it down to the point where they’re ready to start trying different options in cows, to see whether they’re on the right track to developing a vaccine or drug that will stop Johne’s in its tracks. Work can begin as soon as funding is found.

Adel Talaat, a microbiologist at the School of Veterinary Medicine, has put a genomics-based technology to work to study thousands of genes from Johne’s-causing bacteria. From an initial pool of 5,000 genes, he screened a library of 1,500 mutants that possessed unique factors, meaning they had potential for being targets that could be used to stop the bacteria.

The key is to determine which virulence factors are actually important.