US firm creates plant-based vaccines

Vaccine firm Medicago has successfully used a plant-based production method to create more than 10 million doses of an H1N1 VLP influenza vaccine candidate in one month, the US Department of Defense’s DARPA lab announced on 25 July.

DARPA gave Medicago $ 21 million in funding for the project as part of its Blue Angel program, the goal of which is to give the Pentagon the ability to rapidly react to a global pandemic.

The World Health Organization estimates between 20 and 50 per cent of the world’s population being affected if a pandemic were to emerge, and that it may take six to nine months to develop a vaccine using current production methods.

Plant-based production is cheaper and faster than the conventional method for producing vaccines, growing them in fertilised chicken eggs. Egg-based vaccines can take months to develop, while plant-based production can be used to develop a vaccine in weeks. “The results we’ve achieved here with plant-based production of vaccines represent both significant increase in scale and decrease in time-to-production over previous production capabilities in the same time period.

The plant-made community is now better positioned to continue development and target FDA approval of candidate vaccines,” said DARPA Program Manager Alan Magill. “Once the FDA has approved a plant-made vaccine candidate, the shorter production times of plant-made pharmaceuticals should allow [Department of Defence] to be much better prepared to face whatever pandemic next emerges.”