Texas A&M develops vaccines from plants?

Danger Room:

The Pentagon’s after a better way to strike back against infectious diseases and bio-threats. Now, a team at Texas A&M may have come up with a way to turn tobacco plants into vaccine-making machines.

Darpa, the military’s risk-taking research agency, is investing $40 million into the Texas Plant-Expressed Vaccine Consortium, which will test the tobacco-based method and then offer up 10 million doses of H1N1 vaccines. Once the process has been vetted, the researchers anticipate a scalability that could yield 100 million vaccine doses per month.

Plant-based vaccine production has been in the workings for years now, including the successful creation of edible bananas that protect against the Norwalk virus. Last summer, Darpa requested proposals for plant-based options that would rapidly yield protective antigens for the creation of potent vaccines. Tobacco is a particularly good option, because it’s cheap and grows quickly — yielding vaccines in weeks, rather than the several months required for the standard egg-based method that’s been used since the 1950s.

Darpa’s been funding fast-tracked medication production since 2005, when the agency launched their Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) program. Although Darpa was already funding research into Avian Flu protection, they realized that H1N1 was a more pressing priority. “In response to the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, AMP’s plant-based platform redirected its rapid scale-up processes that were initially developed for avian influenza,” Darpa’s announcement states.

The Texas A&M consortium also received $21 million from Darpa for the creation of Project GreenVax, which will work towards the quick, plant-based production of a myriad of vaccines. Having the program in place would offer a method to mitigate newly emerging viruses before they turn into widespread pandemics. The project will be housed in a custom-built, 21-acre compound, which features a 145,000 square foot “biotherapeutic production facility” that uses mobile “pods” to grow the plants.

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Those Aggies can be pretty clever. This is an interesting idea that could also have an application for vaccines to combat biological warfare agents. The rapid production method would sem to be a good fit.