Plant-made vaccines and reagents for the One Health initiative

Rybicki, Edward Peter

The production of the kinds of complex biologics that constitute modern vaccines and diagnostic reagents is a well-developed science, albeit highly expensive. Veterinary and especially human vaccine production requires Good Manufacturing Practice, and typically involves sterile cell-based systems that include bacterial, yeast or fungal, and animal cells cultured in highly controlled environments that are expensive to establish, and costly to maintain. An alternative production system that promises far cheaper production of active pharmaceutical ingredient, if not of finished product, is "molecular farming," or the use of plants and plant cells to make complex biologics. This field is in fact nearly 30 y old in 2017, and is becoming increasingly sophisticated: many proofs of concept and of efficacy for animal and human vaccines and therapeutics have been obtained, and several products are even licensed for human use (see reviews [5] [6] [7] [8] ).