Natural Pig Plasma Immunoglobulins Have Anti-Bacterial Effects: Potential for Use as Feed Supplement for Treatment of Intestinal Infections in Pigs

Hedegaard, Chris J.; Strube, Mikael L.; Hansen, Marie B.; Lindved, Bodil K.; Lihme, Allan; Boye, Mette; Heegaard, Peter M. H.

In order to become a viable alternative to antibiotics in the intensive pig production a product based on natural antibodies should be affordable to the users and, therefore the method used to purify the immunoglobulins should be efficient, very economical and able to handle very large volumes of starting material (blood plasma). These are all characteristics of the chromatographic expanded bed adsorption (EBA) procedure which has previously been demonstrated for the efficient purification of immunoglobulins directly from blood plasma [19] . In this study we investigate the potential of natural antibodies purified by EBA chromatography from normal finisher swine blood plasma for binding to pig relevant intestinal pathogens as well as for their inhibition of adhesion to a porcine intestinal cell line in vitro and for their inhibition of intestinal colonization in a pig in vivo model of E. coli colonization.