A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: One Virus. Three Isolates. Three Very Different Outcomes.
At first glance, these three survival curves may seem like minor variations of the same experiment. In reality, they reveal a more important message for anyone developing vaccines, functional feeds, therapeutics, or breeding programs targetingInfectious Pancreatic Necrosis Virus (IPNV).
The only difference between these studies? The viral isolate.
As the data shows, the Chilean, Scottish, and Norwegian IPNV isolates each produce markedly different disease outcomes, despite being evaluated using the same challenge model. This highlights a critical consideration in efficacy testing: not all strains of a pathogen behave the same. This is why the right challenge model for your innovation matters.
IPNV remains one of the most economically significant viral diseases affecting salmonid aquaculture worldwide. Although commonly referred to as a single disease, IPNV exists as numerous strains and isolates that vary in virulence, pathogenicity, and their interaction with different fish populations. A product that demonstrates excellent protection against one isolate may perform very differently when challenged with another. Likewise, a genetic line that appears resistant under one challenge model may not exhibit the same level of resilience when exposed to a different circulating strain.
For companies investing in product development or selective breeding, choosing the wrong challenge model can lead to misleading conclusions, delayed commercialization, or missed opportunities to optimize performance for the markets that matter most.
Many efficacy studies are conducted using only a single laboratory isolate. While this approach can answer specific research questions, it doesn't always reflect the diversity of pathogens encountered in commercial production.
By evaluating products against multiple isolates, researchers gain a more complete understanding of efficacy across different disease pressures. Testing against the isolates that are most relevant to your target production region helps ensure research findings translate into real-world success.
At Onda, we've built one of the industry's most comprehensive IPNV challenge capabilities.
We are currently the only contract research organization offering efficacy screening against three geographically distinct IPNV isolates—Chilean, Scottish, and Norwegian—allowing clients to select the challenge most relevant to their market or compare product performance across multiple strains.
Combined with our access to multiple Atlantic salmon host backgrounds, clients can evaluate how both pathogen diversity and host genetics influence efficacy. This provides a more complete picture of product performance than testing against a single virus-host combination alone.
Whether you're developing vaccines, functional feeds, novel therapeutics, or breeding more resilient fish, selecting the right challenge model is just as important as the product itself.