Plant cell factories and mucosal vaccines

Walmsley, Amanda M; Arntzen, Charles J

Many advances continue to be made in the field of plant-derived vaccines. Plants have been shown capable of expressing a multicomponent vaccine that when orally delivered induces a T-helper cell subset 1 response and enables passive immunization. Furthermore, a plant-derived vaccine has been shown to protect against challenge in the target host. Increased antigen expression levels (up to 4.1% total soluble protein) have been obtained through transformation of the chloroplast genome. In view of these findings, plant-derived vaccines have been proved as valuable commodities to the world’s health system; however, before their application, studies need to focus on optimization of immunization strategies and to investigate antigen stability.