An edible vaccine development for coronavirus disease 2019: the concept

Sohrab, Sayed Sartaj

A novel coronavirus was emerged in December 2019 from Wuhan city, China and has now become a global threat to human health. Currently, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread to more than 34 countries with 2,445 deaths and 78,811 confirmed cases. Currently, there is no vaccine available against COVID-19. The traditional vaccines development requires more time and high cost and due to this, the disease outbreaks becomes more challenging. Now a days, plants have become more attractive platform for edible vaccine production than the other system. The development of an edible vaccine in a selected plant system has many significant advantages such as; easy and efficient oral delivery, low cost with higher scale production, avoidance of any trained medical personnel for delivery, lack of any pathogenic infection, multicomponent expression in a single plant, and so forth. In this manuscript, the concept, development, and importance of an edible vaccine have been discussed. By using this plant-based platform, an edible vaccines can be produced in many crops like banana, cucumber, carrot, lettuce, and tomato against various diseases. Due to increasing cases globally with COVID-19, there is an urgent requirement to develop an ideal vaccine and antiviral therapy against this virus to control the disease worldwide.