A new vaccine for polio, grown in plants, could be highly effective at helping the eradication of the disease, developers say.
Professor George Lomonossoff and colleagues at the John Innes Centre, an independent research centre in Norwich, UK, used virus-like particles, or non-pathogenic mimics of poliovirus grown in plants, when developing the vaccine. They explain that genes carrying information to produce these particles are infiltrated into the plant tissues, and then reproduced in large quantities by the plant.
The particles look like viruses but are non-infectious, as they are biologically altered to be unable to replicate. In this way, they safely stimulate the immune system to respond as if it was exposed to the real virus.
Tests on animals showed that these "poliovirus mimics" lead to immunity from the disease. The researchers, who published their work yesterday (15 August) in Nature Communications, say this paves the way for human vaccines to be produced by plants, and on a major scale if pharmaceutical industry takes it on.
"The poliovirus is a very nasty disease and certainly until the 1950s was a real scourge," says Professor Lomonossoff. "The beauty of this system of growing non-pathogenic virus mimics in plants, is that it boosts our ability to scale-up the production of vaccine candidates to combat emerging threats to human health.
"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."
The research group is part of a consortium funded by the World Health Organisation, seeking to eradicate polio with vaccines that avoid use of the live virus, to avoid the risk of the virus escaping.
Marisan, J. et al. Plant-made Polio 3 stabilized VLPs: a candidate synthetic Polio vaccine. Nature Communications 15 August 2017 doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-00090-w [abstract]
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