Determination of the optimal method for the concentration and purification of 146S particles for foot-and-mouth disease vaccine production

After the severe outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in South Korea in 2010, the Korean government implemented a vaccination policy and set out to develop an FMD vaccine using a local FMD virus (FMDV) strain. As a part of the basic research for domestic FMD vaccine development, three methods commonly used for the concentration and purification of FMDV to produce FMD vaccine antigens were compared. Among common concentration methods, including polyethylene glycol (PEG) precipitation, ammonium sulfate precipitation, and ultrafiltration, the most effective method both for concentrating 146S particles and eliminating non-structural proteins (NSPs) was found to be PEG precipitation. Classical PEG precipitation showed the highest recovery of 146S particles (85.4%) with removing 99.8% of the other proteins, including NSPs. To the author's knowledge, this is the first study to compare the current three methods with regard to quantifying intact virus particles (146S). These findings may provide important insights for the development of new FMD vaccines using a local FMDV strain in the near future.