Vaccination is now widely undertaken in aquaculture and is increasingly used to achieve profitable and sustainable farming of fish. However, the challenge for farming enterprises is that the inter- and intra-regional diversity of pathogens requires development of vaccines that are designed specifically for pathogen variants.

Tasmania, Australia’s southern-most state, produces in excess 30,000 tonnes of farmed salmonid fish. Since its inception in the mid-1980s, the Tasmanian salmonid aquaculture industry together with the state Government Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water & Environment has been pro-active in developing, commercialising and producing customised vaccines specific for enzootic pathogens. The success of these vaccines has assisted in instigating an active vaccine R&D program. The broad aims of this program are to develop vaccines for emerging infectious diseases and to enhance the efficacy of existing vaccines. As production in Tasmania increases, new pathogens are emerging, of which the Tasmanian Rickettsia-like organism, the Tasmanian Aquabirnavirus and Tasmanian Aquareovirus are of particular importance. In this presentation, we report the successful development of a commercial-ready vaccine against the Tasmanian Rickettsia-like organism and how ongoing R&D is expected to deliver pan-specific vaccines for all the bacterial and viral pathogens of significance to the salmonid aquaculture industry in Tasmania.