Plant Derived Vaccines

Plants offer enormous potential as production platforms for vaccines and therapeutic proteins. Plant-derived vaccines, for example, present an alternative to conventional vaccines by facilitating safe and effective oral delivery through consumption of edible plant tissue. Many infectious diseases enter the body through mucosal surfaces such as the gut, and as a result, vaccines expressed in the form of edible plant tissues offer a select advantage. The plant tissues can protect the antigen as it passes through the digestive tract. Plants are capable of producing recombinant antigens that undergo similar posttranslational modifications as their mammalian-derived counterparts and in contrast to bacterial expression systems. Moreover, high yields of biopharmaceuticals can be obtained, depending on the specific plant production platform. After these purification steps, the cost of producing plant-derived proteins represents only a fraction of the cost of proteins produced from analogous mammalian cell culture systems.