Recent Advances in Tick Vaccine Development and Future Prospects

Ticks are an obligate blood-feeding ectoparasite having significant economic challenges by infesting a range of domestic and wild animals. They rank just behind the mosquitoes as effective vectors for numerous bacterial, viral, protozoan, and rickettsial diseases. This leads to economic losses in the livestock sector. Current methods for controlling ticks primarily rely on acaricides; however, the emergence of acaricide resistance, along with environmental contamination and residues in food products, highlights the need for alternative strategies. Immunization presents a promising, cost-effective, and eco-friendly approach to tick control. A key challenge in development of vaccine is identifying tick’s antigens that play essential roles in survival and reproduction of tick. There have been many studies during the last few decades on finding potent candidate antigen (surface-exposed and hidden) using methods such as expression library immunization (EST), immune mapping, RNA interference, and bioinformatics. This review aims to provide an overview of the current development in tick vaccine. The future prospects include combining tick antigens with different protective mechanisms and pathogen-derived antigens.