ARLINGTON, VA. — The current outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), which began in February 2022, remains an active threat to the US poultry industry, the nation’s egg supply and impacts the prices consumers pay for eggs and other poultry-related and egg-based products. After egg prices soared to multiple record highs in early 2025, the Trump administration launched a series of initiatives to address the situation, including several funding opportunities to research innovative means to detect and control the disease spread. Some of these projects were featured in a panel at the recent Agricultural Outlook Forum in Arlington.
While vaccines currently are not approved for commercial use in US poultry operations, some of the federal grants issued did fund vaccine developments. One such project utilized a bug-to-bird approach to deliver vaccines. The project, a partnership between Kansas State University, North Carolina State University and the Insect Farming Initiative, was featured at the Outlook. Laura Miller, associate professor of veterinary virology at Kansas State University and one of the project leads, said traditional vaccine approaches often fail for several reasons beyond the federal trade policy constraints.
Miller said traditional methods require certified vaccination crews, which can increase opportunities for cross contamination and raise barns’ biosecurity risks. Also, vaccines often are administered through injectables, which requires each bird to be handled individually. This process not only adds stress to the flocks and often causes secondary mortality, but also can take weeks to administer one vaccine since some operations have millions of birds. Also, vaccines tend to be fragile and can require specialized equipment to maintain temperature and other physical specifications to maintain the vaccine’s integrity.
During her panel presentation, Miller presented a new model for HPAI immunization with CRISPR-engineered insects that express HA antigens. This “bug-to-bird” method would allow birds to consume the vaccine through a standard feeding process, supplying the birds with both nutrition and medicine. She said this approach is rapid-response ready, can be easily scalable, reduces labor costs by eliminating vaccination crews and delivery requirements, and the antigens can easily be adapted to new strains that would reduce the downtime during new outbreaks.
Since the vaccine is protected by the insect body, it is shelf stable and does not require special handling or temperature controls for transporting. And since the birds ingest the vaccine orally through their normal feeding schedules, additional labor is not required, which reduces the biosecurity risk and eliminates the need to handle birds individually.
“Our oral, insect-based vaccine can be delivered as a feed supplement, allowing a producer to protect thousands of birds quickly without the stress of manual handling,” Miller said in a recent K-State Today article about the project. “Mealworms, a natural component of poultry diets, offer significant nutritional benefits while serving as efficient biological factories for vaccine antigens.”
Besides vaccines, projects developing early detection methods also were recently funded.
“Our current 24- to 48-hour testing timeline simply cannot contain a virus spreading at this scale,” said Sergio Riberio, founder and chief executive officer at Radiolife. “By the time we get results, the damage is done. We need to move from reactive crisis management to proactive prevention.”
Riberio also presented his project during the panel discussion. He said the project uses a radio frequency technology and an AI-controlled database to detect viral presence in real time without the need to interact with the birds or utilize biochemical agents.
“Every biological system, including viruses, interacts with electromagnetic fields in predictable ways,” Riberio said. “Our AI engines analyze these patterns continuously, comparing them against our validated database. The moment we detect an anomaly, alerts go out instantly, not in 48 hours, not in 24 hours, but within minutes.”
The panel did not say when these projects would be finalized or implemented — if at all — into the current processes for detecting and controlling HPAI.
Chelsey Shivley, veterinarian with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service at the US Department of Agriculture who also is the assistant director of the HPAI Poultry Innovation Grand Challenge said change isn’t imminent. The HPAI Poultry Innovation Grand Challenge selected and provided funding for the projects presented during the Ag Outlook panel.
“We’re trying to figure out what can we do better in the future given that we’ve been dealing with this virus and this outbreak for several years,” Shivley said. “This isn’t the first time we’re dealing with avian influenza. This virus keeps popping its head back up, so what can we do better in the future, and that’s why we’re investing now to figure out if we can add these tools. But at this time, nothing will change.”