A reassortment vaccine candidate as the improved formulation to induce protection against very virulent infectious bursal disease virus.

Abstract Infectious bursal disease (IBD) is a highly contagious immunosuppressive disease affecting all major poultry producing areas of the world. Infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) is genetically prone to mutation so that vaccines have to be changed accordingly. However, the traditional method of vaccine development with blind passage could not fit the style of the emergency prevention of IBDV. In this study, for the first time, a segment-reassortment attenuated IBDV rXATB, consisting of modified segment A of a prevalent strain and segment B of an attenuated strain, was designed and rescued; rXATB was stable and could induce good humoral and cellular immune responses which resulted in excellent protection against the lethal challenge of vvIBDV without obvious immunosuppression in chicken. This study revolutionarily provides a new formulation based on reverse genetics to develop new vaccine against prevalent IBDV.