Health: plants as bio-factories for production of future vaccines

At ENEA, molecules from tobacco plants that could provide a low-cost, effective way to manufacture vaccines and new diagnostic tools to tackle sanitary emergencies like SARS and other epidemics like the mosquito borne - disease Zika virus, have been produced. The study has been  published on the international scientific journal “Frontiers in plant Science”.

New prospects for bio-medicine: molecules from tobacco plants that could provide in the short term a low-cost, effective way to manufacture vaccines and new diagnostic tools to tackle possible new health emergencies, have been developed at the ENEA Research Center Laboratories. This technique was first applied on SARS, the severe acute respiratory syndrome declared a global health emergency in 2003 that, even if contained at that time,  still poses a high risk to public health, since, despite international efforts, scientists have not yet come up with a vaccine .

ENEA has created an actual “molecule factory” offering great potential: thanks to the study, conducted in collaboration with the IIS ( Public Health Institute) and the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong, molecules causing the SARS virus were produced in plants. The same technique can be applied to other infectious agents that can potentially be used for bioterrorism or having pandemic potential, such as the Zika virus epidemic, one of the major global health threat in recent years which has recently spread  throughout Latin America.

The study, based on the use of plants as bioreactors-in this case a tobacco species considered a model plant for molecular farming- has allowed to produce, in particular, a molecule of the virus recognized by the antibodies of people that had been affected by SARS in 2003, paving the way to the development of  rapid and low-cost diagnostic tests and innovative tools for the prevention and cure of this disease. Vaccines obtained from plants are, in fact, a new frontier in the prevention of epidemics and pandemics: vaccines are rapid to produce, safe and low-cost.

The study,  the outcome of a high-level collaboration between Italian and Chinese multidisciplinary research institutes involved in molecular biology, plant biotechnologies, virology, medicine and immunology, has been recently published on the authoritative, open access, peer-reviewed international journal “Frontiers in Plant Science”.

ENEA has been conducting research on biotechnologies and the use of plants to produce  biopharmaceuticals for many years: at the ENEA Casaccia Laboratories new genetic engineering approaches are being studied to obtain, in a low-cost, simple way, antibodies, enzymes and other active principles for human use and create proteins to tackle viruses and other infections. Plants offer several advantages in comparison with conventional methods utilized for producing molecules of pharmaceutical interest. Besides being able to produce molecules with high structural authenticity, they can grow rapidly and at low cost  under non-sterilized conditions and since they don’t contain any human viruses or pathogens, they are production platforms safe for human use.

Besides SARS, during the last two decades other diseases have emerged, like Ebola and most recently Zika, with the potential to become global pandemics provoking  global health crises, due to the risk of international spread.

“The response of Governments and pharmaceutical industries  to these contagious events is halting and disjointed- Rosella Franconi, researcher at ENEA, pointed out- especially as concerns research, prevention and investments. The skills to develop diagnostic tests and vaccines rapidly and at low cost can provide an important contribution to the management and resolution of health crises but it’s necessary to improve global health surveillance and prevention measures, as well as support public research on developing effective prevention and control technologies against infections caused by emerging or re-emerging viruses”.

Access the study at: Demurtas et al. “Antigen Production in Plant to Tackle Infectious Diseases Flare Up: The Case of SARS”

For more in-depth information see: http://www.who.int/csr/disease/en/

For more information please contact:

Rosella Franconi, ENEA Casaccia Research Center, rosella.franconi@enea.it