By DOUG SCHMITZ
Iowa Correspondent

AMES, Iowa — While U.S. pork industry officials have reassured the public that pork is safe to eat, despite recent Influenza A outbreak concerns, an Iowa State University researcher has developed a vaccine to protect pigs from the newly named H1N1 (“swine flu”) virus.

“Now that H1N1 virus is in pigs, we’re seeking funding to conduct a proof-of-concept study to demonstrate how rapidly we can produce an effective and safe vaccine for pigs,” said Hank Harris, ISU professor of animal science and veterinary diagnostic and production animal medicine.

Harris developed the vaccine after a Canadian swine herd was recently found to be infected with the H1N1 virus. His start-up company, Harrisvaccines, Inc., uses a technology that is much faster for producing vaccines than traditional methods.

Referred to as the RNA Backbone, the technique was developed for human use by the North Carolina-based company Alphavax, which Harrisvaccines has adapted for pigs.

Harris said the technique uses electric current to combine the RNA Backbone material with the relevant genetic information from the active flu virus through a process called electro-poration.

Harris said his new vaccines using the Backbone method may have approval from the USDA by 2011.

“Right now, to make human or animal vaccines, you have to get the live virus and grow it in eggs or cell culture and then inactivate it,” he said. “We don’t have to do that. That’s what’s really neat about this technology: you don’t really need the live virus. We just need the genes from the original virus, which can be made synthetically.”

Harris and a team of ISU researchers are implementing flu vaccines into the genetic makeup of corn, which he said may someday allow pigs and humans to get a flu vaccination just by eating corn or corn products.

“We’re trying to figure out which genes from the swine influenza virus to incorporate into corn so those genes, when expressed, would produce protein,” he said. “When the pig consumes that corn, it would serve as a vaccine.”

Harris said the corn vaccine would also work in humans when they eat corn or even corn flakes, corn chips, tortillas or anything that contains corn. Funded by a grant from ISU’s Plant Sciences Institute, the corn vaccine may be fully available in 5-7 years if research goes well.

“While we’re waiting for (Kan Wang, an ISU professor in agronomy) to produce the corn, we are starting initial experiments in mice to show that the vaccine might induce an immune response,” said Brad Bosworth, an ISU affiliate associate professor of animal science.