Plant-made vaccines and reagents for the One Health initiative

Rybicki, Edward Peter

Plant-made vaccines against influenza viruses are perhaps the poster children for molecular farming: many candidate vaccines made in plants have shown efficacy in animal models; candidate pandemic virus vaccines have been made to the scale of 10 million doses in less than a month, vaccines suitable for outbreak viruses similarly (see review 9 ). Efficacy to homologous challenge has been shown in mice, ferrets and chickens; so too has efficacy to heterologous challenge with high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) strain H5N1 in chickens. 10 While most of this work is directed toward protecting humans against potentially pandemic influenza viruses, it is often overlooked that the same vaccine candidates could be equally useful in birds and in swine: indeed, breaking the chain of recycling of influenza viruses that seems to occur in intensively farmed pigs is a prime goal of One Health. 11 Other targets for plant-made influenza vaccines include dogs 12 and potentially horses.