A UCF professor is ready to move on to human trials to test the anthrax vaccine he has "safely and cleanly" developed in tobacco plants.
Just last week, Henry Daniell, a professor in the Burnett College of Biomedical Sciences and the founder of biotechnology company Chlorogen, was informed by the National Institute of Health that 100 percent of the mice he vaccinated survived after exposure to the anthrax toxin.
"This is the first animal study successfully done [using plant-produced anthrax vaccine], and we are ready to move on to human trials," Daniell said.
Anthrax is a Category A disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, because of its easy transmission, high mortality and social disruption. It is also one of the commonly used bioterrorism agents.
Currently, there is only one company in the United States that produces the anthrax vaccine, directly from the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. However, the company does not have a large supply of the vaccine, and some of its batches have been contaminated with the anthrax toxin.
Daniell and his team have come up with a solution for both problems. "We cloned [the desired] gene from the [anthrax bacterium] and put it in tobacco plants," Daniell said. The team then grew the plants, extracted the proteins and purified the anthrax vaccine, which was then injected into mice. According to NIH tests, all the mice developed enough immunity to survive exposure to the actual toxin.
Another advantage of Daniell's research is production of large quantities of anthrax vaccines. The team inserts the desired genes into an organelle of the plant cell called a chloroplast. Each cell has roughly 10,000 chloroplasts, "so in essence, we're putting 10,000 copies of the gene per cell," he said. One acre of tobacco plants has the capability of producing roughly 400,000 million anthrax vaccines, "which is more than enough for the entire U.S. population," Daniell said.
Daniell also believes that plant-based vaccines can be marketed at a fraction of the price of today's vaccine because there will be no need for some of the expensive vaccine production steps.
Other research teams have also tried producing vaccines in plants like the potato, but "not many people are willing to eat a raw potato," Daniell said jokingly.
Instead, his team studies carrots and is optimistic in developing cheap edible vaccines - from Hepatitis C to edible insulin - that can be marketed to developing countries, which are usually in dire need of such vaccines.
Daniell hopes to start Phase I human trials of the anthrax vaccine "in the near future" and foresees a global market for this tobacco-produced vaccine.
Be the first to comment on this article!