The Swine Health Information Center (SHIC), through a co-funding partnership with the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, recently awarded funding for six projects to advance swine disease monitoring and mitigation capabilities. Aligning across both organizations’ priorities, these six projects help SHIC fulfill its mission to generate new intelligence and tools for preventing, preparing for and responding to emerging swine disease threats. Representing a total investment of $719,415, this public-private partnership enables leveraging of Pork Checkoff dollars awarded to SHIC through a 1:1 match from FFAR to maximize swine health research initiatives.
Newly funded projects address SHIC’s research priorities, including enhanced integration of production and disease monitoring data, mitigation strategies for airborne diseases, development of novel tools and sample types for improved African swine fever virus detection including recombinant strains, and the evaluation of swine wastewater as a novel diagnostic sample type for detection of emerging diseases. Funding timely research enables SHIC to provide project outcomes that drive action for emerging disease prevention, preparedness, mitigation, and response for the US swine industry. Actionable data from project outcomes will be shared with pork industry stakeholders as soon as information becomes available.
These six new projects were initiated between November 2025 and June 2026, spanning 12 months in duration, and are being conducted at three institutions in the US and Canada. Research outcomes from the funded projects will provide critical information and resources to help pork producers as they face emerging disease challenges in their swine herds.
SHIC/FFAR co-funded projects, categorized here in the Center’s strategic pillars, include:
Improve Swine Health Information
Integrating production and disease monitoring data to strengthen industry reporting, optimize benchmarking, and support evidence-based decisions
- Principal Investigator: Cesar Corzo, University of Minnesota
- Objective: To develop an automated and timely data integration, analysis, and reporting framework that combines production metrics with disease monitoring data to create an interactive benchmarking tool.
Monitor and Mitigate Risks to Swine Health
Real-time monitoring of performance indicators of filters and an electrostatic precipitator (ESP) to advance the control of airborne diseases in swine
- Principal Investigator: Montserrat Torremorell, University of Minnesota
- Objective: To advance the control of airborne transmitted diseases for bioexclusion and biocontainment of pathogens of interest to the swine industry.
Responding to Emerging Disease
Development of diagnostic tools necessary for early detection of African swine fever recombinant genotype I/II viruses
- Principal Investigator: Aruna Ambagala, Canadian Food Inspection Agency-National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease
- Objective: To develop and validate a PCR assay that differentiates recombinant ASFV I/II from other ASFV genotypes and to understand the clinical presentation and pathogenesis of recombinant ASFV I/II compared to historical ASFV strains.
Surveillance and Discovery of Emerging Disease
Leveraging wastewater for genome-based surveillance of emerging threats in swine health
- Principal Investigator: Vladi Karniychuk, The Ohio State University
- Objective: To harness experience from COVID-19 wastewater-based surveillance to develop and validate non-invasive tools for the early detection of emerging swine diseases in wastewater from commercial pig farms.
Improving detection and understanding of viral pathogens in swine wastewater
- Principal Investigator: Igor Paploski, University of Minnesota
- Objective: To enhance wastewater sampling of manure pits including best practices for collection and processing swine-specific wastewater samples for assessing viral persistence.
Evaluation of tongue tip fluids for ASF surveillance
- Principal Investigator: Kalhari Goonewardene, CFIA-National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease
- Objective: To evaluate the use of tongue tip fluids for the early detection of ASF virus and antibodies from swine infected with highly virulent, moderately virulent and lowly virulent strains.
