On 7 February 2023, Prof. Yousef Saleh Alhafedh, Vice President Research & Development Program at the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture, Mr. Ahmed Rashid Alballaa, Chairman of the Saudi Aquaculture Society, and Dr. Victoria Alday-Sanz, Director of Biosecurity and Breeding programmes at the National Aquaculture Group (NAQUA), visited the National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC) to expand an existing collaboration on viral diseases in shrimp. BIOTEC and NAQUA agreed to join forces in the work on Strategy to improve White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV) tolerance in shrimp—WSSV is a virulent shrimp pathogen that causes considerable economic damage to the shrimp farming industry globally. The work is an extension to an ongoing project on the Exploitation of the viral accommodation mechanism to control viral diseases in shrimp, which is funded by the National Research Council of Thailand, NAQUA, and Charoen Pokphand Foods PLC. The extended project is joined by Mahidol University, Chulalongkorn University, and the Rajamangala University of Technology.
Dr. Wonnop Visessanguan, Executive Director of BIOTEC, Dr. Kallaya Sritunyalucksana-Dangtip, Principle Researcher at BIOTEC and the BIOTEC-NAQUA project’s principal investigator, along with our experts in aquaculture, hosted the delegations.
