Small Ruminants

Large pharmaceutical manufacturers sometimes have no interest in pursuing costly approval procedures or in continuing to serve existing approvals when it comes to vaccines against rarely occurring diseases and/or for livestock species that are less important from their point of view.

Thus, herd-specific vaccines offer our customers solutions to protect their livestock even against those diseases for which licensed vaccines are not available.

Certain pathogens change their antigenic properties over time under field conditions. As a result, antigens contained in licensed vaccines may lose their current relevance and thus possibly also their protective effect.

In order to achieve an optimal protective effect of the herd-specific vaccine, it is important to regularly examine the pathogen situation in the herd in order to be able to react to changes with an appropriate update of the vaccine composition.

The production of herd-specific vaccines requires official approval of the laboratory, which presupposes appropriate technical equipment and special manufacturing experience.

Prior to the actual production of a herd-specific vaccine, the pathogens are isolated from diseased animals and characterized. Subsequently, these pathogen isolates are mass propagated in pure culture. The raw material harvested from this process is finally turned into a vaccine through further processing steps and additives.

So-called adjuvants are added to the vaccines to stimulate the immune response of the vaccinee. We use aluminum hydroxide, incomplete Freund's adjuvant or commercial oil adjuvants as standard.

Herd-specific vaccines are always inactivated, i.e. they do not contain any replicable antigen. They are usually injected parenterally, i.e. administered by injection to each animal individually.

Since herd-specific vaccines are produced individually for a herd according to the respective order, we require a time span of about 4-6 weeks (bacterial vaccines) or 6-8 weeks (viral vaccines/combinations of viral and bacterial pathogens) between order and delivery of the vaccine. For each order, the bacterial and/or viral isolates are first characterized, the antigen is multiplied, and the legally required quality testing according to the European Pharmacopoeia (EP) is performed after the vaccine is ready.

Therefore, when ordering herd-specific vaccines, please note the delivery times!