Plant-based Vaccines: The Future of Preventive Healthcare?

Abstract

Infectious diseases threatened humankind countless times through history, when knowledge on microorganisms was absent and medical capabilities were limited. Pandemics and outbreaks caused death of millions, brought empires to their knees and even wiped some ancient civilizations. In “modern” days, despite of improved medical application, sanitary precautions and effective medicines, infectious diseases are still cause of more than 54% of total mortality in developing countries. Millions of people are protected from the infectious diseases annually as a result of mass immunization campaigns. Nevertheless, novel diseases as COVID-19, MERS-CoV, avian influenza, Ebola, Zika and possible future infections require dynamic vaccine research and investment. Along with all the advantages of vaccines, there are several limitations regarding cost, biosafety/biosecurity, storage, distribution, degradation topics. Plant-based vaccine production for humans and animals has been under serious consideration to overcome some of these limitations. Nowadays, plant biotechnology brought new insight to vaccines research through gene transfer strategies to plants and improvements in amount, isolation and purification and addition of adjuvant for production of recombinant vaccine antigens in plants. Recombinant vaccines can undeniably offer us new standards and legal regulations to be introduced for the development, approval, authorization, licensing, distribution and marketing of such vaccines. The aim of this chapter is to exploit uses, methods and advantages of recombinant DNA technology and novel plant biotechnology applications for plant-based vaccine research in respect to existing infectious diseases.

Development of Plant-Based Vaccines for Prevention of Avian Influenza and Newcastle Disease in Poultry

“…Protein expression can be achieved by transient or stable transformation of plants (reviewed in [ 36 ]). In stable transformation, the desired gene is permanently incorporated into the plant cell genome via nuclear or plastid integration to generate transgenic lines.…”

Stress Memory and Priming Applications in Plants: Potential for Breeders

“…The selection process requirement in each generation is a major disadvantage of mutation breeding. On the other hand, transgenic technology has revolutionized as the fastest adopted crop technology in the history of modern agriculture, which enables the improvement of plants with the predictable changes for target trait in a relatively short time [5][6][7][8]. However, the restrictive effects of legal regulations regarding the cultivation of genetically modified crops and their transport into other countries are some of the obstacles in front of this strategy as well as metabolic imbalance or off-target effects caused by genetic modification [9,10].…”