Programming Plant Cells to make Human Vaccines

Humans have coexisted with plants and microbes from the beginning of human evolution. As humans learned to domesticate various plants, their food supply exploded. Early shamans and healers learned to use herbs for healing. In the modern era, microbes have jumped ahead of plants in the biotech production of gene-engineered pharmaceuticals, but plant scientists are determined that plants can be useful pharm-factories of gene engineered medicines and vaccines.

This Eurekalert newsrelease reports on efforts to design a vaccine against HIV in plants.

By creating fusion molecules, the researchers have found a way to make plants produce more of the molecules (antigens) needed for vaccines. At the same time, they may also have discovered a way of producing better targeted vaccines. Obregon and her colleagues in Dr Julian Ma's laboratory are working with the p24 core protein of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). This protein plays a central role in eliciting the immune response to HIV infection, and is therefore likely to be an integral part of any multicomponent vaccine for HIV.

Plants have already been used to produce many types of vaccine molecules, but a consistent problem has been achieving adequate levels of protein expression in order to make them viable as bioreactors for vaccines.

Obregon and her colleagues have found a way to significantly boost HIV-1 p24 protein production in plants by producing an entirely new molecule – a fusion of the HIV-1 p24 protein and part of another protein, human immunoglobulin A (IgA) - a major component of the immune system. The team found that the HIV-1p24 antigen produced in this way elicited appropriate immune response in mice.

This brief report discusses early efforts to develop a vaccine against avian flu, using plants. This blog reports on efforts to use the tobacco plant to develop a vaccine against the black plague, yersinia pestis.

Transgenic plants are becoming more and more useful as plant scientists develop their techniques. The mitigation of many modern problems lies in the intelligent use of transgenic plants, animals, and microbes. In this posting I briefly discussed the use of engineered plants for mitigating global warming. The limits of the human imagination are currently restricting the human vision of a cleaner and healthier world.