The health and welfare of livestock is critical to UK food and nutrition security. It is essential we have the infrastructure for the safe and reliable research, surveillance and containment of viruses that can threaten livestock and national security.
The Pirbright Institute is a unique national capability and international leader in preventing and controlling viral livestock diseases, including those that spread from animals to people (zoonotic diseases).
Since its first investment in Pirbright in 1994, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has provided over £430 million in funding to The Pirbright Institute. It has supported Pirbright’s continued research into some of the world’s most devastating animal diseases, underpinning significant improvements in disease control, including vaccines and therapeutics.
Pirbright also attracts international investment into the UK research system. In 2019, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded US $5.5 million to Pirbright to establish the Livestock Antibody Hub, marking the single biggest international investment into UK livestock immunology research.
BBSRC has since partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, investing £40 million to Pirbright. The investment will help tackle livestock diseases that severely compromise international food security and act as reservoirs of human diseases. The funding underpins a new Centre for Veterinary Vaccine Innovation and Manufacturing (CVIM) which will support transition of vaccines from the laboratory to commercial development.
About The Pirbright Institute
The Pirbright Institute is one of BBSRC’s eight strategically supported institutes. BBSRC’s strategic and sustained funding into priority research areas has been crucial to Pirbright’s success.
The institute works to provide the UK with the capacity to predict, detect, understand and respond to high-consequence livestock and zoonotic viral diseases. This will protect our food and economic security and improve the health and wellbeing of animals and people.
As a National Capability, Pirbright offers highly specialised science facilities that are unique in the UK. Reference laboratories for the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) sit alongside research facilities, creating synergies between scientific spheres.
Several of Pirbright’s services and facilities contribute to this, including science technology platforms for bioimaging, bioinformatics, cell culture, flow cytometry and unique collections of animal lines and viruses.
Pirbright’s success is underpinned by its people, including research and technical professionals, whose expertise and skillsets are indispensable. The concentration of talented individuals and new infrastructure at Pirbright attracts international talent, allowing Pirbright to progress and evolve.
Establishment of The Pirbright Institute
Becoming leading experts in foot-and-mouth disease
Pirbright’s beginnings can be traced back to 1914, but it was its work into foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) that truly established the institute as an authority and leader in virus research, including:
- purifying the first FMD particles in 1952
- developing the method to produce inactivated FMD vaccines in 1962
- playing a major role in controlling FMD outbreaks in 1967 and 2001, the latter costing the UK economy £8 billion
- producing a FMD pen-side test for diagnosis in 2009
- developing a novel FMD vaccine in 2013 that was more stable, safer and cheaper
FMD control and surveillance remain a priority and Pirbright has recently launched a web portal, OpenFMD for data sharing among scientists and policymakers.
Broadening Pirbright’s remit
In 1963, Pirbright broadened its focus from solely FMD and was renamed the Animal Virus Research Institute. Pirbright began research into other diseases, including bluetongue and rinderpest and expanded its facilities, setting up insectaries to study vectors of disease. Through this, Pirbright has:
- developed and validated a vaccine for peste de petits ruminants in 1980
- revealed the structure of the bluetongue virus through X-ray crystallography in 1998
- diagnosed the first instance of bluetongue in the UK, preventing a widescale outbreak and saving the UK economy £485 million in 2007
In 2010, a new era began when construction started on six major facilities, followed by rebranding as The Pirbright Institute in 2012. Projects included:
- a new high-containment laboratory, the BBSRC National Virology Centre: The Plowright Building; for organisms that are exotic, easily spread and produce severe and notifiable diseases
- a low containment laboratory, the BBSRC National Vaccinology Centre: The Jenner Building
- a large animal high-containment facility: The Brooksby Building
- an insectary to rear insect vectors of viral diseases
- a specific pathogen-free hatchery to support poultry research: The Houghton facility
- a low-containment poultry experimental facility: The Biggs Avian Research Building
BBSRC’s support of these facilities represents one of the largest UK investments in science infrastructure for decades and provides a national capability for virus research.
BBSRC National Virology Centre: The Plowright Building
The Plowright Building opened in 2014 and is Pirbright’s high-containment laboratory facility, underpinning work into monitoring and responding to viral threats in the UK. Viruses studied here are the highest risk, causing significant animal welfare and economic impact globally. They include:
- foot-and-mouth disease virus
- bluetongue virus (BTV)
- peste de petits ruminants virus
- African swine fever virus
- African horse sickness
- high pathogenicity avian influenza
The BBSRC National Virology Centre: The Plowright Building. Credit: James Brittain and The Pirbright Institute
The Plowright Building and rinderpest
Rinderpest, a devastating disease of cattle, was eradicated from the world in 2011. Professor Walter Plowright developed the highly effective vaccine and Pirbright was the world reference laboratory that coordinated testing.
Once eradicated, Plowright became one of only seven global Rinderpest Holding Facilities (RHFs) permitted to store virus stocks, highlighting the high containment and safety of the building.
In June 2019, the institute destroyed its rinderpest stocks within Plowright after working with WOAH and FAO on a sequence and destroy programme for the virus. The sequenced genomes are a resource that can be used to combat similar viruses, or the same virus if it reappears in the future, without the risk of maintaining live rinderpest stocks.
Pirbright set an example to other RHFs to follow them and ensure the virus has no means of escape, therefore thwarting the potential threat of future outbreaks.
Bluetongue at The Pirbright Institute
BTV is an economically significant disease of ruminants that impacts milk production and results in high mortality rates in farmed animals.
Plowright is currently home to the UK reference laboratory for bluetongue diagnostics, the Non-Vesicular Reference Laboratory. This facility and Pirbright’s animal testing have been instrumental in the surveillance and understanding of bluetongue virus in the UK and internationally.
In 2023, a new strain, BTV-3, was detected in southern England, representing the first case of BTV in England since 2011. Pirbright’s capabilities could easily be scaled up for monitoring and surveillance of the disease in the UK. Following confirmation of the first BTV case of 2024 in late August, Pirbright tested over 20,000 samples by November.
Pirbright researchers also monitor Culicoides midges that transmit the virus to livestock. This allows researchers to understand vector activity and when transmission risk to animals is highest, using this information to inform policy decisions for virus control.
Discover how scientists at The Pirbright Institute predict, detect, understand, and respond to bluetongue virus. Credit: The Pirbright Institute.
Video transcript and on-screen captions are available by watching on YouTube.
The BBSRC National Vaccinology Centre: The Jenner Building and The Biggs Avian Research Building
After completion of Plowright, lower containment level laboratories were added to Pirbright’s infrastructure with the opening of The Jenner Building in 2017.
The viruses worked on here include:
- Marek’s disease virus
- infectious bronchitis virus (IBV)
- low pathogenicity animal influenza viruses
Scientists working within The Jenner Building. Credit: The Pirbright Institute
The work in Jenner is complemented by research at the Biggs Avian Research Building which opened in February 2023. Designed and optimised for poultry welfare, the Biggs building provides facilities to study poultry diseases.
Professor Bryan Charleston, Director of The Pirbright Institute said:
This building provides an important new facility for the UK and International partners to study important diseases of poultry to develop measures to prevent disease and improve welfare and productivity.
Marek’s disease
Marek’s disease virus (MDV) results in economic losses of over £1.4 billion a year globally, causing tumour growth, paralysis and death in poultry. MDV is hard to control due to its ability to become more virulent and vaccine-resistant, passing from vaccinated animals to unvaccinated animals through shed viral particles.
Pirbright’s research tracks viral changes and aims to produce vaccines and prevent transmission.
Pirbright scientists have also worked to extend the reach of MDV vaccines to other poultry viruses, reducing the number of inoculations required by animals. They successfully produced a vaccine effective against MDV and IBV in 2019. The genetic engineering method used to produce the vaccine enabled fast and reliable production, highlighting how this technology could be used for rapid responses to mutated viruses.
Avian influenza
Avian influenza impacts poultry productivity and welfare, resulting in significant economic losses to farmers around the world. Some strains can infect humans.
Pirbright researchers work to understand the virus, poultry immune responses and differences in virulence between host species.
Alongside this, vaccines against avian influenza have also been produced, including:
- a vaccine with dual protection against duck enteritis virus and avian influenza to limit the impact of ducks as reservoirs of avian flu. The vaccine was produced in partnership with Chinese institutes as part of the UK-China Centre of Excellence for Research on Avian Diseases in 2018
- a fast-acting and long-lasting poultry vaccine against influenza which lessens virus transmission and has reduced production costs compared to pre-existing alternatives, produced in 2021
FluMap consortium
Pirbright, working together with the Animal and Plant Health Agency, is part of the FluMap consortium, established in 2022 and supported by £1.5 million investment from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and BBSRC.
The consortium brings together UK science leaders to study avian influenza. It has made important discoveries by exploring the genetics of viral spread, airborne transmission of the virus and immunity among a range of bird species.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) continues to support this work. UKRI has invested £3.3 million into the FluTrailMap consortium, the follow-on programme to FluMap, which responds to the evolving nature of avian influenza and is now also exploring cow flu.
Pirbright scientists contribute to the fight against COVID-19
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pirbright’s virology facilities and immunology expertise for animal virus research were applied to understanding and tackling the human pathogen. BBSRC provided the flexible funds needed to rapidly shift the institute’s focus.
Pirbright’s contribution to the COVID-19 effort involved:
- deploying equipment and personnel to set up COVID-19 diagnostic laboratories
- supporting the development of tools for testing UK vaccine candidates
- using the pig model, developed at Pirbright, to evaluate COVID-19 vaccine candidates. This helped to accelerate the transition of candidate vaccines into human clinical trials
- exploration of the potential for wildlife and livestock species to act as reservoirs for the virus
- collaborating with Imperial College, Kings College London and the Medical Research Council (MRC)-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research (MRC CVR), to establish the SARS-CoV-2 Genotype to Phenotype consortium. The consortium worked openly with other consortia sharing experimental practices and resources to understand the symptoms and transmission of new SARS-CoV-2 isolates in humans and vaccine efficacy against them, supporting policy decisions
Tackling emerging threats
Pirbright has held a long-term partnership with the MRC CVR as UKRI facilities specialising on virus research, focusing on animal and human diseases respectively. Partnering expertise in virus research provides opportunities to collaborate in One Health studies. One Health recognises that human health and animal health are closely connected.
Together, Pirbright and the MRC CVR lead the Monkeypox (Mpox) consortium, supported by a £2 million investment from BBSRC and MRC. Mpox can cause severe disease and death in humans and there are major epidemics in central Africa, which resulted in spillover into Europe in 2022.
The consortium works to understand the virus and develop tests to speed up infection diagnosis and drugs for virus treatment. Within Pirbright’s facilities, research into how existing licensed drugs prevent virus replication and spread has begun.
Next steps for The Pirbright Institute
Pirbright continues to expand its infrastructure, installing a new containerised data centre in September 2024. This has allowed Pirbright to run experiments and analyses using artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
Construction of The Brooksby Building was completed in November 2024. The Brooksby Building is a high-containment facility for large animal experimental work and adds the final piece to Pirbright’s ecosystem, complementing its existing facilities and further enhancing the UK’s capabilities.
Pirbright is nationally and internationally recognised for its capabilities, attracting investment from the UK and abroad to continue important work and act as the home for global virus efforts. In future, CVIM will work to facilitate and accelerate the development and global deployment of vaccines effective against livestock diseases, including preventing crossover into humans, leveraging Pirbright’s expertise and investment in infrastructure.
The growing Pirbright infrastructure, coupled with world-leading research talent and highly professional technical support, provides the facilities and trusted expertise for continual improvements to animal health, protecting food security, human health and the global economy.
Top image: The BBSRC National Vaccinology Centre: The Jenner Building. Credit: Richard Chivers, The Pirbright Institute