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Originally Posted by pip08456
Interesting new vaccine enters phase 3 trials in UK. A vaccine derived from plants.
I wonder what Jonbxx thinks.
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Yeah, it's an interesting technology, getting plants like tobacco and their close relatives to make drugs. The tech has a fun name 'pharming'
Pharming has also been used to make drugs in milk from sheep and cows.
The huge advantage of using plants to make vaccine is the ease of handling. Vaccines are often made using cell culture which is pretty tough and time consuming whereas plant technologies need the skills of your regular gardener once you have the DNA in there.
The downsides are getting the drug out afterwards and scaling up. Plant cells are pretty tough to break down while keeping the virus like particle intact unlike animal or insect cells which just need mild detergents. With scaling, you would think just sow fields of the plants but there are issues with genetically modified crops out there in the wild.
It looks like Medicago have got it working well however and GSKs experience with adjuvants to boost the immune system looks good.