IUIS Veterinary Immunology Committee (VIC) is committed to removing barriers to the global accessibility of veterinary immunological reagents for the advancement of research that benefits both animal and human health. One such barrier is global awareness of the availability of tools and resources that underpin veterinary immunology and expand the choice of biomedical models for translational human immunology.
Raising awareness of the Veterinary Immunological Toolbox for wider impact requires outreach and engagement with diverse audiences beyond the veterinary immunology community. To this end, members of IUIS VIC have published a positional paper on the past, present and future of the Veterinary Immunological Toolbox in Frontiers in Immunology (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2020.01651/full).
Included within that paper is a description of the UK Immunological Toolbox, a new initiative that lists immunological reagents for livestock species and facilitates the production of new reagents that address gaps in current capability. Full details of the UK Immunological Toolbox website and its searchable database are described in a paper published in Immunology (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/imm.13227) and a more informal article in the September 2020 edition of Immunology News published by the British Society for Immunology (https://www.immunology.org/publications/immunology-news).
These articles bring the current challenges facing the ‘One Health’ agenda into sharp focus and offer new solutions for translational immunology for animals and humans.