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UK scientists have devised a safer and easier to mass-produce vaccine against foot-and-mouth disease, Reuters reported Wednesday.

The discovery borrows from the technology behind livestock vaccination and, researchers believe, should massively increase production capacity and severely cut costs. Furthermore, the new technology could be leveraged to improve vaccine against similar virus, including polio.

The breakthrough in this vaccine lies in the fact that it does not require live virus in its production - an important consideration as foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is extremely infectious and vaccine facilities handling virus samples are difficult to secure.

"It spreads like wild fire," said David Stuart, a professor of biology at the University of Oxford, who led the research.

In 2007 an outbreak of FMD occurred in southeast England. As it turned out, it was traced to a nearby vaccine site. The same facility, is home to some of the researchers behind the new vaccine.

Now this vaccine, unlike the standard FMD livestock vaccines, is manufactured from synthetic empty protein shells containing no infectious viral genome, scientists reported in the journal PLOS Pathogens on Wednesday.

The vaccine has been tested in small-scale cattle trials with very encouraging results.

Which is translated into a vaccine that can be produced without the expensive costs associated with bio-security, and does not need to be kept refrigerated.
"One of the big advantages is that since it is not derived from live virus, the production facility requires no special containment," Stuart said.

"One could imagine local plants being set up in large parts of the world where foot and mouth is endemic and where it still remains a huge problem."

Every year, between 3 billion and 4 billion doses of FMD vaccine are administered in the world. However, many regions of Africa and Asia, where the disease is a serious problem, experience shortages.

According to Stuart, it would probably take around six years to bring the new vaccine to market.

“It is too early to give an indication of how much the vaccine will cost.”