Cultures of roots from tobacco, tomato and petunia are used to produce a vaccine for avian influenza.
Developing a plant made vaccine for malaria
Vaccines offer efficient and cost-effective protection against a wide range of infectious diseases. Unfortunately, no effective vaccine is available against malaria and this infection remains one of the most important causes of human morbidity and mortality in the developing world. Over the past two decades a number of candidate proteins for inclusion in a subunit vaccine have been identified. Malariologists believe that an effective malaria vaccine will need to include multiple proteins that induce protective immune responses against different stages of the Plasmodium life cycle. The construction of such multivalent vaccines is beset by considerable logistical difficulties, not the least of which is how to deliver them to a population living in endemic areas. Compared to other routes of vaccine administration, oral delivery has several advantages making it an attractive strategy for vaccine development.
We have constructed transgenic tobacco plants expressing merozoite surface protein (MSP) 4/5 from Plasmodium yoelii at between 0.05 and 0.4% of total soluble proteins. These plant-made antigens share similar epitopes to those found on the proteins produced in other expression systems, and to those found on the native proteins expressed by Plasmodium parasites. Studies undertaken in 2005 demonstrated that plant-made MSP4/5 is immunogenic in mice following oral delivery.
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