A team of duo researchers at Universite Laval claims that more effort needed to develop plant-based vaccines. The research team has published a perspective study in the journal Science that espouses the benefits of plant-based vaccines and suggests how they can be made.
As the ravage of the pandemic continues, researchers worldwide continue to look for novel ways to vaccinate individuals against similar infections. This is due to speculations that this may not be the last pandemic. In this effort, some researchers have started to look for alternative vaccines. The research duo suggests developing plant-based vaccines that could be a very good approach.
Typically, vaccines are produced in eukaryotic or bacterial systems, and have proven to be very effective. However, these vaccines have high production costs. To present a sustainable alternative, plant-based vaccines would be much cheaper to produce with other benefits as well.
Firstly, resource requirement for plant-based vaccine would be far less resource intensive. This implies vaccines would be grown in fields in place of manufactured in bioreactors. Secondly, the benefit is associated with the inherent nature of plants that they cannot be infected with human pathogens that need vaccines.
Also, earlier research shows that plant-based vaccines are likely to generate a powerful immune response than the ones made in other ways. The yield of plant-based vaccines is much higher than the ones produced using other methods.
Finally, plant-based vaccines could be injected directly as a food product without the need of extracting or processing for some patients is an added advantage.
In fact, manufacture of plant-based vaccines is not unheard, and there is one that is produced to treat Gaucher disease, note the authors.
