Abstract

A variety of methods are available to combat avian diseases in the commercial setting, including improved farm management practices, use of antibiotic drugs, selection of disease resistant chicken strains, and manipulation of the chicken immune system. In the latter category, development of vaccines against the major avian diseases has become a priority for the poultry industry. With increasing demands for developing alternative control programs for many poultry diseases, it is important to understand the basic immunobiology of host-pathogen interactions in order to develop novel vaccination strategies. From studies carried out in many mammalian species, it is evident that host immune responses to intracellular pathogens are complex and involve many components of the host immune system. For enteric pathogens such as Eimeria and Salmonella, understanding cell-mediated immunity is most important because antibodies, although abundantly produced locally, can not access and act on these intracellular pathogens. In poultry, slow but increasing understanding of various components of host immune system mediating cellular immunity is opening new opportunities for thorough investigation of the role of thymus-derived lymphocyte subpopulations and cytokines in normal and disease states. This paper will review recent progress with chicken cytokines that have been characterized, and discuss various experimental strategies to enhance host immunity to pathogens using chicken cytokines.