Dr Raquel Portugal

Group

African Swine Fever Vaccinology

Raquel joined the African swine fever vaccinology group in 2025 as Postdoctoral Scientist after working in the African Swine Fever Group since 2017. Raquel’s main focus has been the development of a subunit vaccine for ASFV and understanding immune responses that may correlate with protection. Raquel did her PhD in Animal Science and Technology at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Lisbon, Portugal, studying ASFV induced host-cell apoptosis and its modulation in primary macrophages. Through 2009-2016 she continued research on African swine fever as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI), Germany, and Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Lisbon, Portugal, where she worked on different projects focusing namely on genome engineering for viral attenuation, high throughput methods for recombinant virus selection, interferon signalling during infection or next generation sequencing of different virulence strains

Dr Raquel Portugal

Projects

Publications

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Dr Raquel Portugal

Projects

African swine fever control tools

Publications

Six adenoviral vectored African swine fever virus genes protect against fatal disease caused by genotype I challenge

Transcription termination and readthrough in African swine fever virus

African swine fever virus and host response - transcriptome profiling of the Georgia 2007/1 strain and porcine macrophages

A porcine macrophage cell line that supports high levels of replication of OURT88/3, an attenuated strain of African swine fever virus

A pool of eight virally vectored African swine fever antigens protect pigs against fatal disease

Articles

Pirbright African swine fever vaccine protects 100% of pigs from developing severe disease

Pirbright and UCL scientists map African swine fever genome

Pirbright study identifies African swine fever virus proteins for vaccine development

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