Battling bovine tuberculosis

Background

Bovine tuberculosis (TB) is one of the most serious animal health challenges facing the cattle industry in the United Kingdom today. Despite ongoing efforts, the current “test-and-slaughter” approach has not successfully stopped the disease from spreading. One major reason is the presence of wildlife reservoirs, particularly badgers, which can carry and transmit the infection.

Vaccinating cattle could become a powerful tool in controlling bovine TB. However, there are currently no licensed vaccines available for cattle. To develop effective vaccines, scientists need a deeper understanding of how protective immunity works in cattle and how vaccines can safely trigger that protection.

Bovine TB doesn’t only affect animals:

• the disease places a heavy financial burden on farmers and the wider agricultural sector.
• the bacterium that causes bovine TB, Mycobacterium bovis, can also infect humans, making it a zoonotic disease.

TB behaves very similarly in cattle and humans in terms of immune response and disease progression. Because of this, cattle are increasingly viewed as valuable models for studying human TB. Research in this area can therefore benefit both animal health and human medicine.

At LARIF

At present, there are no fully effective, widely deployable vaccines for bovine tuberculosis (TB). However, the BCG vaccine used in humans has been shown to trigger protective immune responses in calves, offering a valuable starting point for research.

Professor Jayne Hope and her research group are investigating how calves’ immune systems respond to the BCG vaccine. Their goal is to uncover the biological mechanisms that lead to protective immunity. By understanding these processes, researchers can design better vaccines and plan how to use them effectively in the field.

One of the group’s key approaches is a surgical calf model that enables scientists to collect immune cells from the exact site where a vaccine is injected into the skin. These cells are among the first to encounter the vaccine and play a crucial role in shaping the body’s immune response.

Studying these early interactions provides rare and valuable insights into:

• how the immune system first recognises a vaccine
• how protective responses are built
• which immune pathways are most important for long-term protection.

By revealing how vaccine-induced immunity develops at the earliest stages, this research helps guide the creation of next-generation bovine TB vaccines.

Ultimately, these advances could support more effective disease control in cattle and reduce the wider impacts of bovine TB.

Impact

Traditional “vaccinate and challenge” models, where animals are vaccinated and later exposed to disease to test protection, can be time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes provide limited insight into why a vaccine succeeds or fails.

The research led by Professor Hope is changing this. Her team has developed tools to measure the early immune responses triggered right after vaccination.

Instead of waiting to see if a vaccine works at the end of a long study, these methods help researchers understand how and why a vaccine is (or isn’t) effective much sooner.

By analysing early immune activity, scientists can identify biological 'signatures' of successful vaccination, ie. patterns that indicate strong protective immunity is developing.

These signatures can then be used to:

• screen new vaccine candidates more quickly
• compare different vaccination strategies
• predict effectiveness earlier in development.

Because these approaches provide earlier and clearer data, they have the potential to reduce the need for large, resource-intensive animal trials. This makes vaccine research more efficient and supports better animal welfare practices.

Although developed for bovine tuberculosis research, this innovative strategy can be applied to a range of animal diseases.

By improving how we understand vaccine-induced protection, it could accelerate vaccine development across veterinary medicine.

Publications