Plant-made vaccines and reagents for the One Health initiative

Rybicki, Edward Peter

While inexpensive vaccines that can be made profitably at small scale are one of the drawcards of the use of molecular farming, it is not generally appreciated that reagents for some of the world's more dangerous zoonotic pathogens are also expensive and hard or dangerous to make. The need for reagents is exemplified by a recent large study of seroprevalence in humans in Nigeria against the tick-borne Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever bunyavirus (CCHFV). 32 In South Africa, routine detection of antibodies in animals or in humans to CCHFV is done using the nucleoprotein (N) in ELISA tests: making this protein is a hazardous and expensive process, because it involves fractionating it from live virus prepared from CCHFV infected cell cultures or brain tissue of inoculated suckling mice, under high biosafety conditions. While it can also be prepared as a recombinant protein from both insect and mammalian cells, these methods are both expensive and the protein yields and quality are often not good.