A project has been launched to develop a plant-based system to produce and assess the capacity of different proteins as vaccines against livestock diseases such as avian influenza and bluetongue.
The project is a collaboration between the EU and Russia, with participation from South Africa, and funded under the EU Framework 7 programme.
Named Plaprova, it will be coordinated from the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK.
Transient expression techniques will be used to temporarily stimulate plants into over-producing proteins, which can subsequently be assessed for their value as vaccines.
Plants have been used to produce pharmaceuticals in this way before, but technical constraints mean their value has not been fully realised.
A few candidates with proven vaccine ability have been produced and, although these proteins are effective at preventing disease, they have limited commercial use as they are in competition with existing conventional products.
They have, however, shown that plant-based vaccines production and assessment is possible, and safe.
The Plaprova consortium will exploit transient expression systems recently developed by partners that can produce amounts of protein suitable for testing in weeks, rather than months.
This means that large-scale screening for candidate vaccines is now within reach, allowing products for which there is no conventional counterpart to be produced.
Initially, the consortium will concentrate on diseases of importance to farming in both the EU and Russia, which includes avian influenza, bluetongue, foot-and-mouth disease and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome.
Proteins identified through this screening programme will be developed for large-scale production and ultimately low-cost production of effective vaccines.
