Alternatives to Antibiotics: Neonatal Immunomodulation to Improve Disease Resistance in Animals

Our overall goal is to utilize innate training as an approach to enhance disease resistance in a manner that is highly relevant to both agriculture and biomedical research. The goal of the proposed research is to identify the utility of BCG-induced training in neonatal animals (Aim 1), as our labs have already demonstrated BCG-induced innate training both in vitro and in vivo with pigs and cattle. Better understanding the molecular mechanisms of innate training will lead to further approaches to reach our overall goal, and research in Aims 2 and 3 are designed for this purpose. The approach is innovative in the use of neonatal animals and cells, which is a target age for enhancing disease resistance in humans and food animals, as well as testing of relevant disease models.