In a warehouse building off the interstate in Ames, a two-story lab is busy creating vaccines for all kinds of animal diseases. One of them is the bird flu vaccine, which will help ward off the disease infecting millions of chickens and turkeys in Iowa and neighboring states.

Hank Harris of HarrisVaccines said his lab team has been creating vaccines for swine and canines for years, and most recently has come up with a vaccine for the specific strain of the bird flu causing the outbreak.

“We’ve created a really simple model that we use to create a vaccine, so it doesn’t take very long to come up with one,” said Harris. “We created this current vaccine for the bird flu in about a month.”

Harris said the process is fairly straight forward and utilizes new technology that many labs across the country do not have. And most interestingly, Harris’s team does not have access to the live virus, and it’s had to work around that obstacle.

“We have a lot of expertise in developing a vaccine without a live virus,” said Harris. “We just need to get the gene sequence…usually off the Internet…and we can synthesize that gene in that sequence, put it in our platform, and make a vaccine.”

Harris detailed what makes this particular strain of the bird flu is that wild birds are immune to it, while turkeys and chickens are not.

“At one point in the gene, there is an enzyme all throughout the body of turkeys and chickens that splits,” said Harris. “That’s what kills the chicken – the split allows the virus to get into the cell and grow. And the vaccine we’ve created prevents that.”

HarrisVaccines has two labs that create vaccines, not only for the USDA to approve but also for private clients, such as farmers and veterinarians, that need to treat infected animals. Harris said hopefully he’ll hear from the USDA soon and get his vaccine licensed and onto poultry facilities to treat chickens and turkeys.