Newcastle disease, vernacularly known as Ranikhet disease, infects the domestic poultry, causing heavy mortality of birds and financial losses to the poultry farmers. Dr. Ramneek, Director, School of Animal Biotechnology, Guru Angad Dev Veterinary &Animal Sciences University Live attenuated as well as killed virus are used as vaccines for chicken and other birds to confer immunity. However, a new approach to enhance life and efficiency of vaccine, is to use suitable vaccine adjuvant. New molecular tools are offering potential to investigate the better vaccine adjuvants that may be used as an immno-modulator. The School of Animal Biotechnology of GADVASU, has been sanctioned a research project by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, to design novel vaccines adjuvant against Newcastle’s disease with outlay of Rs 26 Lacs. The project, which is in collaboration with Central Agricultural University, Imphal, Mizoram, aims towards identifying ligand-based vaccine adjuvant which may find application in veterinary vaccine production with enhanced and long-lasting immunity. Another objective of the project is to study the responsiveness of the indigenous chicken for up-regulation of the genes to reinforce the innate immunity. Dr. C. S. Mukhopadhyay will be the Principal Investigator of the project. Dr Ramneek revealed that this is the 24th extramurally funded research project have so far being sanctioned by national agencies. He further elaborated that the School of Animal Biotechnology has made commendable achievement in the national scenario by securing a number of competitively earned research grants in the cutting edge research areas. The School is offering MVSc/MSc and PhD degrees in Animal Biotechnology since past few years and has set up state of the art teaching and research facilities.
