Characterisation of a novel vaccine delivery system for livestock

Background Healthy animals perform better than those that are diseased; therefore there are significant benefits from preventing disease on farm by investigating new vaccine delivery systems. Recently, viral vectors have risen to prominence as candidates for generating immune responses. Of these viral candidates, lentiviruses are attractive as they have the ability to transduce nondividing antigen presenting cells. For example, lentiviral vectors have been shown to produce an antigenmediated immune response in mice, providing long term, sterile protection against Malaria[1].