In vitro assessment of foot-and-mouth disease vaccine immunogenicity: advances, challenges, and ethical considerations

Vaccination is widely used to control foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), necessitating robust approaches for evaluating vaccine potency to ensure a consistent supply of effective and safe vaccines. Traditional (in vivo) potency testing methods rely on live animal models, raising ethical concerns, logistical constraints, procedural variability and significant financial costs. In vitro approaches have therefore been increasingly explored to complement these methods and address these challenges. Recent