MicrobiologyBytes

Our major defense against infection with influenza viruses is immunization of individuals with an annually updated vaccine that is currently produced in chicken eggs, with a global annual capacity of about 400 million doses, a scale of production insufficient to combat a pandemic. Furthermore, at least six months is required between the identification of new virus strains to be included in the vaccine formulation and the manufacture of bulk quantities. Uncertainties over the robustness of egg-based vaccine production are intensified even further by the emergence of H5N1 strains that are highly virulent to both chickens and eggs. There is a need to develop alternative vaccine production systems capable of rapid turnaround and high capacity. Recombinant subunit vaccines should circumvent some of the concerns regarding our current dependence on egg-based production.

This paper reports on the production and evaluation of domains of influenza haemaglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) fused to the thermostable enzyme lichenase. All vaccine targets were produced using a plant-based transient expression system (Nicotiana). When tested in ferrets, vaccine candidates containing these engineered plant-produced influenza HA and NA antigens were highly immunogenic, and were protective against infection following challenge with homologous influenza virus. This plant-based production system offers safety and capacity advantages, which taken together with the protective efficacy data reported, demonstrates the promise of this approach for subunit influenza vaccine development.

A plant-produced influenza subunit vaccine protects ferrets against virus challenge
Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses 2008 2: 33–40

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 8:56 am and is filed under Biology, Health, Medicine, Microbiology, Science, Virology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.