LISTEN: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded $2 million to researchers at Georgia Tech to develop an oral avian influenza vaccine for chickens. GPB's Chase McGee reports.

One of Kyo Brown's chickens inside her backyard chicken coop in Decatur. Prohibiting free ranging is just one biosecurity measure that chicken owners and producers are encouraged to take as highly pathogenic avian influenza spreads across the U.S. and across species.

Georgia Tech is researching development of a possible oral vaccine for chickens against highly pathogenic avian influenza that's spread across the U.S. and across species.

Credit: Sofi Gratas/GPB News

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded $2 million to researchers at Georgia Tech to develop an oral avian influenza vaccine for chickens.

Over the past few years, around a half million chickens in Georgia have been culled in the fight against H5N1, the current prevalent strain of avian influenza.

Mike Farrell is a principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. His team is working to develop an oral, bacteria-based vaccine that can be fed to chickens to prevent the virus.

"Bacteria, they already live in our guts, and that includes chicken guts as well," he said. "We take probiotics in the morning sometimes, chickens are fed probiotics in their diet. Probiotic bacteria are generally considered safe, food safe. So it's a very attractive platform to build a vaccine upon."

Their team's research could results in many candidates for a potential vaccine, and the team hopes to use new tools like artificial intelligence to weed out all but a few promising candidates. 

Farrell said treating viruses with a bacterial vaccine is a relatively new idea, and it could have tons of applications for both chickens and humans down the road.

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