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Anti-Tick Vaccines: Current Advances and Future Prospects

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Vaccine Design

Part of the book series: Methods in Molecular Biology ((MIMB,volume 2411))

Abstract

Ticks are increasingly a global public health and veterinary concern. They transmit numerous pathogens that are of veterinary and public health importance. Acaricides, livestock breeding for tick resistance, tick handpicking, pasture spelling, and anti-tick vaccines (ATVs) are in use for the control of ticks and tick-borne diseases (TTBDs); acaricides and ATVs being the most and least used TTBD control methods respectively. The overuse and misuse of acaricides has inadvertently selected for tick strains that are resistant to acaricides. Furthermore, vaccines are rare and not commercially available in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It doesn’t help that many of the other methods are labor-intensive and found impractical especially for larger farm operations. The success of TTBD control is therefore dependent on integrating all the currently available methods. Vaccines have been shown to be cheap and effective. However, their large-scale deployment for TTBD control in SSA is hindered by commercial unavailability of efficacious anti-tick vaccines against sub-Saharan African tick strains. Thanks to advances in genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics technologies, many promising anti-tick vaccine antigens (ATVA) have been identified. However, few of them have been investigated for their potential as ATV candidates. Reverse vaccinology (RV) can be leveraged to accelerate ATV discovery. It is cheap and shortens the lead time from ATVA discovery to vaccine production. This chapter provides a brief overview of recent advances in ATV development, ATVs, ATV effector mechanisms, and anti-tick RV. Additionally, it provides a detailed outline of vaccine antigen selection and analysis using computational methods.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biosecurity, Biotechnical and Laboratory Science, College of Veterinary Medicine Animal Resources and Biosecurity, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

    Dennis Muhanguzi, Christian Ndekezi, Joseph Nkamwesiga, Sylvester Ochwo & Magambo Phillip Kimuda

  2. International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), Nairobi, Kenya

    Shewit Kalayou

  3. Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi), Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

    Moses Vuyani

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  1. Dennis Muhanguzi
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  2. Christian Ndekezi
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  3. Joseph Nkamwesiga
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  4. Shewit Kalayou
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  5. Sylvester Ochwo
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  6. Moses Vuyani
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  7. Magambo Phillip Kimuda
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Correspondence to Dennis Muhanguzi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lankenau Institute for Medical Research, Wynnewood, PA, USA

    Sunil Thomas

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Muhanguzi, D. et al. (2022). Anti-Tick Vaccines: Current Advances and Future Prospects. In: Thomas, S. (eds) Vaccine Design. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2411. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1888-2_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1888-2_15

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  • Publisher Name: Humana, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-0716-1887-5

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