Commercial vaccines leapt toward state-of-the-art on July 8 when the USDA granted a license for the world’s first DNA vaccine for any species. Horses will benefit from this accomplishment that springs from more than four years of collaborative research between Fort Dodge Animal Health and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Fort Dodge, CDC, and USDA jointly announced the achievement on July 18. The vaccine should arrive on the market in early 2006.

“This is the first DNA vaccine approved by any regulatory authority in the world for commercial sales rather than just for experimental usage, laboratory studies, and scientific paper publication,” says Steve Chu, DVM, PhD, senior vice president of Global Research and Development at Fort Dodge. “This is actually to be used in the commercial setting in the real world.”

A veterinary DNA vaccine for salmon gained approval in Canada about a week after the Fort Dodge DNA vaccine.

According to Chu, the collaboration between Fort Dodge and CDC began officially in 2001, but it was brewing shortly after the disease was discovered in the United States. CDC has led the basic research on the initial prototype DNA vaccine, while Fort Dodge has led the DNA vaccine development work and the USDA registration studies