Foot-and-mouth disease vaccine potency testing: the influence of serotype, type of adjuvant, valency, fractionation method, and virus culture on the dose-response curve in cattle.

The aim of this study was to determine a relationship between vaccine potency (amount of PD50 per dose) and fraction of clinically protected cattle following homologous challenge with infectious foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus, and to determine the effect of method of fractionation, serotype, type of adjuvant, valency and type of virus culture on the dose-response curve. Data from 297 potency tests of FMD vaccines, comprising 4004 vaccinated cattle, performed at the FMD vaccine production facility in the Netherlands, were used for the present study. A generalised linear mixed effect model was used to analyse the results. Our study showed that the relation between FMD vaccine potency and fraction protected was also affected by the serotype and type of adjuvant. No common level of protection could be assigned to all FMD vaccines with the same amount of PD50 per dose, this information is essential when designing a new standard FMD vaccines control.