Contact: William Davis, 509-335-6051, davisw@wsu.edu
A vision thing: Diagnostic tools and a vaccine for paratuberculosis
Bill Davis has dedicated 25 years to developing monoclonal antibodies necessary for certain animal studies.
Bill Davis, professor of veterinary microbiology and pathology
at Washington State University, exhibited true vision in the 1970s,
when he recognized the potential for veterinary science of
monoclonal antibody technology.
Antibodies are proteins produced by cells of the immune system.
They help neutralize pathogens and produce immunity. Most pathogens
stimulate their hosts to produce a population of diverse
antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies, on the other hand, are
populations of identical antibodies and are created in the
laboratory. A given monoclonal antibody might be specific for an
individual cell type, its state of activation, the strain of a
pathogen, such as the 0157:H7 component of the infamous E. coli
0157:H7, or any one of a number of other cellular characteristics.
As a result, it's a highly specific reagent with a wide variety of
uses.
Davis learned how to make monoclonal antibodies during a
sabbatical with immunologists in Australia and Germany, after which
he returned to WSU. Since then he has produced more than 1,000
monoclonal antibodies that are available for research into how the
immune system functions against infectious agents in food and
animals, especially cattle.
Davis's research focus has been the study of the immune response to
paratuberculosis, including the development of diagnostic tools and
a vaccine for the disease. A persistent disease of cattle that
affects the gastrointestinal tract, paratuberculosis is a major
problem in the United States and abroad. Good diagnostic tests will
help, because infected animals shed the pathogen that causes the
disease before they appear sick.
Davis also would like to learn how the immune system is subverted
or suppressed so that the disease can progress and the bacteria
persist in cattle for the animal's lifetime.
"It's taken 25 years to develop the monoclonal antibodies
necessary to do these studies," says Davis.
Developing a vaccine can also be a difficult undertaking.
Monoclonal antibodies can be used to determine the molecular and
cellular events that occur during the testing of candidate vaccines
by allowing researchers to monitor the immune response to those
vaccines.
Monoclonal antibodies have been used to characterize the human
immune response to tuberculosis. Because the data from these
studies show that the human tuberculosis and bovine
paratuberculosis diseases closely parallel each other, the cattle
disease should be a good model system for the human. Information
gained during the development of a vaccine against paratuberculosis
should help in the development of a vaccine for human
tuberculosis.
"It's a future we'd like to see," he says.