BioStone was awarded USDA AFRI Agriculture Biosecurity Grant for ASF DIVA assay development

DALLAS-FORT WORTH, TX — March 6, 2023 — BioStone Animal Health is pleased to announce that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) has awarded BioStone Animal Health an Agriculture Food Research Initiative (AFRI) grant, from their Agricultural Biosecurity program. The project is entitled: “PARTNERSHIP: Developing Enzyme Linked Immuno-Sorbent Assay (ELISA) Diagnostics to detect African Swine Fever Antibodies and to Differentiate Infected from Vaccinated Animals (DIVA).” Our goal is to develop and commercialize companion diagnostic tools for a promising African Swine Fever (ASF) vaccine candidate developed by the USDA, named ASFV-G-delta-I177L. It is currently licensed and manufactured by Navetco in Vietnam. It has passed numerous field tests and was approved for expanded use (600,000 doses) in 2022. We are excited to develop new ASF ELISA kits with greater sensitivity and broader applications to detect ASF vaccination and immune status. We initiated the development of ASF DIVA ELISAs on a USDA SBIR Phase I Grant (2021), from which we established encouraging proof-of-concept prototypes. This project will support work beyond previous milestones to develop, optimize, and validate these tools in commercial and research settings.

This AFRI Agriculture Biosecurity grant will support BioStone Animal Health and several collaborators. One of them is an ASF reference laboratory at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, National Center for Foreign Animal Disease (CFIA NCFAD), which has access to a large collection of samples taken from swine infected with ASF from different parts of the globe where ASF is endemic. Another collaborator is a research group from the Department of Diagnostic Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine at Kansas State University. Lastly, the grant will support a collaboration with a research group from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kenya. ILRI is a non-profit research institute, which supports food security research, including ASF surveillance in Africa.

About BioStone Animal Health — BioStone Animal Health is a Dallas, TX-based biotechnology company that provides innovative solutions for animal health. BioStone Animal Health works together with our worldwide partners to offer a portfolio of animal disease diagnostic products as well as test kits and reagents for vaccine testing that enables performing a rapid evaluation of the efficacies, stability, consistency, and potency of common animal vaccines. By making these test kits available to the international community, BioStone strives to actively promote and participate in global animal health initiatives. For more information about BioStone Animal Health, visit www.biostoneah.com