Appearing in 1998 in Israel and in the United States, the Koï Herpes Virus (KHV) has spread throughout the world. It causes a contagious and fatal disease that affects both koi (ornamental carp) and common carp fish, and in so doing this pathogen has caused an ecological disaster with considerable economic consequences. The research of Prof. Alain Vanderplasschen of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine has reached the point of successfully producing a vaccine against the KHV virus. The results of this “success story” were recently published in the Journal of Virology (1).

As the head of the laboratory of Immunology and Vaccinology at the University of Liège, Prof. Alain Vanderplasschen, former research director for the FNRS, engaged some years back in a little strategic reflection of a personal kind. His goal was to establish research themes that would combine research interests in both basic and applied science, preserving the attractiveness of the laboratory for researchers, and keeping it in the forefront of research. What led him to make new plans in this way? The constraint of rules involving bioethics and biosecurity was becoming greater and greater, and financing was becoming harder to find for basic research, if its economic value could not be immediately perceived.

Thus Vanderplasschen defined certain criteria, to which the research aims of the laboratory would try to conform. “My desire is to pursue original subjects of research and to work on host-pathogen homology models, in accordance with rules of biosecurity and bioethics,” he explains. In order to remedy the difficulty of finding funding, this veterinarian decided to set out to find ways to control viruses that were costing people money. But the pathogens to be studied were chosen in accordance with the strengths of the laboratory. In fact, Alain Vanderplasschen wanted current research to build on past accomplishments. “This was the context in which the Koi Herpes Virus adventure got started,” he tells us. “It is an excellent example of how the decisions I made were put into practice.”

(1) B. Costes, G. Fournier, B. Michel, C. Delforge, V. Stalin Raj, B. Dewals, L. Gillet, P. Drion, A. Body, F. Schynts, F. Lieffrig, and A. Vanderplasschen, Cloning of koi herpesvirus genome as an infectious bacterial artificial chromosome: demonstration that disruption of the TK locus induces a partial attenuation in Cyprinus carpio koi, in J. Virol 2008 ; doi:10.1128/JVI.00211-08.