Three million Euro’s for a vaccine against ticks

The Institute of Parasitology, which is part of the Biology Centre (ASCR) in Ceske Budejovice, in collaboration with six european partners, will investigate a vaccine against ticks. This vaccine has to prevent multiple tick-borne diseases. The entire project will be coordinated by The Academic Medical Center (AMC) located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The three million Euro’s, funded by the European Commission as part of the FP7 Work Program, will be divided within the consortium.

Lyme disease, tick-borne encephalitis (TBEV) and human babesiosis are all serious human tick-borne diseases that are more and more frequently encountered in Europe. Against most tick-borne diseases there is no vaccine. That is the reason why the consortium, with the AMC as the coordinator, will investigate a vaccine directed against the tick, rather than different vaccines targeting the individual tick-borne pathogens. Thus, a single vaccine could prevent transmission of multiple pathogens from the tick to the host.

The project is named ANTIDotE - ANti-tick vaccines to prevent TIck-borne Diseases in Europe - and will start in December 2013. The consortium consists of European experts in the field of Lyme disease, TBEV, babesiosis and anti-tick vaccines. The other participants within the consortium are the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and Environment (The Netherlands), Free University of Berlin (Germany), Center for Cooperative research in Biosciences (Spain), the small medium-sized enterprise GenXPro (Germany) and the Institute of Virology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Slovak Republic).