Plants have been used to produce a new vaccine against poliovirus in what is hoped to be a major step towards global eradication of the disease.
A team of scientists, including Dr Johanna Marsian working in Professor George Lomonossoff’s Lab at the John Innes Centre, has produced the novel vaccine with a method that uses virus-like particles (VLPs) - non-pathogenic mimics of poliovirus which are grown in plants.
Genes that carry information to produce VLPs are infiltrated into the plant tissues. The host plant then reproduces large quantities of them using its own protein expression mechanisms.
Professor Lomonossoff, from the John Innes Centre said: “This is an incredible collaboration involving plant science, animal virology and structural biology. The question for us now is how to scale it up - we don’t want to stop at a lab technique.”
VLPs look like viruses but are non-infectious. They have been biologically engineered so they do not contain the nucleic acid that allows viruses to replicate. This means that they mimic the behaviour of the virus, stimulating the immune system to respond without causing an infection of poliomyelitis.
Laboratory tests demonstrated that the poliovirus mimics provided animals with immunity from the disease paving the way for human vaccines to be produced by plants on a major scale with the input of pharmaceutical industry collaborators.
Read article in full: Plant-produced polio vaccines could help eradicate age old disease
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Posted by: John Muller | May 30, 2019 at 07:56 AM