Nanchaya Wanasen, Ph.D.
Virology and Antibody Technology Research Unit, National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, NSTDA, Thailand
Vaccines for veterinary diseases are an integral component of good husbandry and farm management. Every year, millions of doses of veterinary vaccines are used to prevent and control diseases. Due to the high volume of vaccines required to maintain good health status of farm animals, inexpensive veterinary vaccines are often required, therefore vaccine production costs must be low. Selection of the most efficient host cell is a crucial step in ensuring economical production. Biotechnology advances have provided valuable tools to engineer host cells to improve virus production. These include the use of lentiviruses to introduce necessary genes to promote viral replication, modifications of host cell susceptibility using CRISPR/Cas9, and the induction of inducible pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) to generate cell types specific for virus growth. Here, we will review several techniques that can be applied to generate host cells most suitable for virus cultivation, especially those related to veterinary diseases such as PRRSV and PEDV.