Developing vaccines to help zoo elephants

Preventing common illness in a herd of pigs or cows can be as simple as administering a readily available vaccine.

It’s not that easy when a zoo elephant or hippopotamus contracts a common virus for which it lacks immunity. There’s usually no ready-made inoculation to keep healthy animals well.

Two zoos in North America experienced a recent outbreak of encephalomyocarditis (EMCV), a significant viral infection of swine and zoologic mammals. That made veterinarians scramble to protect exotic animals under their care.

They found help in the expertise of Newport Laboratories, a Boehringer Ingelheim company in Worthington, Minnesota.

Newport Laboratories works with livestock producers and veterinarians to create preventative, diagnostic and educational tools that ensure peak performance. Employees there typically make custom vaccines for livestock, but they translated their core capability in this case into solutions for zoo veterinarians battling EMCV.

“When you get into these kinds of species, there are no approved vaccines. There's nothing off the shelf. They don’t exist in the case of EMCV,” said Dr. Mark Titus of Newport Laboratories, which researched and produced EMCV vaccines in response to hotspots in North America.

With EMCV, the first indication of infection often is death. Over the past 20 years, EMCV has killed a variety of exotic mammals like African elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, sloths, llamas, various antelope species and many types of nonhuman primates in zoologic parks in the US and other parts of the world.

“It's not so much exotic viruses. It's the unique susceptibilities of non-domestic animals, like zoo animals, where a virus that might be something that’s easily handled in a domestic species is deadly or there's no treatment or vaccine for an exotic species,” said Dr. Kay Backues, former president of the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians, an organization of almost 1,000 veterinarians who work with captive and free-range animals.

“This may sound cliché, but Newport Laboratories is a lifesaver,” Backues said.

Newport Laboratories stands apart from other labs through its use of molecular biology techniques such as gene sequencing and DNA fingerprinting that save valuable time in diagnosing complex problems.

Nearly as critical is Newport Laboratories’ license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create vaccines, which helps veterinary customers navigate regulatory compliance.

“Our biggest advantage is we have a one-stop shop,” Titus said. “Zoos can send us the samples, the tissues, the whatever. And then we will isolate, identify, genetically analyze and compare to the database of previous isolates and then make and then potentially make a product that keeps animals healthy.”

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