Plant Biotechnology: Rice engineered to carry cholera vaccine
The Boston Globe
Randolph E. Schmid, AP Science Writer
June 11, 2007
Here is the excerpt from an article in The Boston Globe on plant biotechnology.
Excerpt…
WASHINGTON --A team of Japanese researchers has developed a type of rice that can carry a vaccine for cholera, a step that could one day ease delivery of vaccines in developing countries.
While it's only the latest of several plants being tested as potential means of producing vaccines, the development is potentially important in medically underserved countries that lack refrigeration to store regular vaccines.
But the work is preliminary, having been tested only in mice.
The team, led by Hiroshi Kiyono of the division of mucosal immunology at the University of Tokyo, reports the development of the new vaccine in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A major advantage of this approach, they said, it that it causes immune reactions both systemwide in the body and in mucosal tissues such as in the mouth, nose and genital tract.
Standard vaccines delivered by needle do not spur immune responses in the mucosal areas.
That means the new vaccine could have an advantage against pathogens that typically infect these membranes, such as cholera, E. coli, human immunodeficiency virus, influenza virus and the SARS virus.
Attempts to alter plants to produce proteins that induce an immune reaction to various diseases have been under way for years, but none has reached the state where it could be used in humans.
"This has not progressed to the degree that we had hoped it would by this time," said Hugh S. Mason, a researcher at Arizona State University who has worked on several lines of plant vaccine study.
Mason cautioned that getting a good response to orally delivered material can be tricky in the harsh environment of the digestive system.
"We're going to have to work on ways to protect it from degradation of the stomach and then release it lower down in the gut so it can be taken up," he said.
In 1998 he published a paper on modifying potatoes to produce a vaccine for Norwalk virus. But he said in a telephone interview last week that "was a relatively preliminary study."…
Full article at The Boston Globe.
