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Plants 'Hijacked' To Make Polio Vaccine (bbc.com)
Plants have been "hijacked" to make polio vaccine in a breakthrough with the potential to transform vaccine manufacture, say scientists. From a report: The team at the John Innes Centre, in Norfolk, says the process is cheap, easy and quick. As well as helping eliminate polio, the scientists believe their approach could help the world react to unexpected threats such as Zika virus or Ebola. Experts said the achievement was both impressive and important. The vaccine is an "authentic mimic" of poliovirus called a virus-like particle. Outwardly it looks almost identical to poliovirus but -- like the difference between a mannequin and person -- it is empty on the inside.
It has all the features needed to train the immune system, but none of the weapons to cause an infection.
I assume they have tested this but to be a good antigen often you need to also have the proper decoration of the particle with lipids and sugars. I would doubt that plants could provide the right version of these for animal antigens. But it's possible this shows it's not neccessary or they have a way around it in the case of polio.
Even more intriguing is the potential for a flu vaccine. What makes that intriguing is that flu vaccine is often raised in eggs. And birds (hence eggs) are the natural resevoir of flu. So there's some risks associated with the use of the native host as the agent for growing the intentionally harmelss vaccine. And there might even be some selectivity on the animals part for things that are more bird adapted than others. With plants one presumably avoids that and the risk of a human catching a plant virus seem negligible.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I think this might be it:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub...
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
If this proves to be generally applicable, it will be a fast way of making a vaccine against whatever new disease strain may happen to break out. No more guesswork over which viral strains to include in this year's flu vaccine.
And because it's a vaccine made by genetically modifying a plant, deploying it will automatically eliminate Luddites from the population. Scientific progress will become possible again, even in Europe and California. I think GMO labeling is a rotten idea, but just this once, let's put a big red USES THE GMO PROCESS label in each vial to make sure.
yeah, my DAMN balls
Now if only we could convince idiots to let doctors inoculate their children.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
How is this a breakthrough? We know how to efficiently produce biological structures by genetically modified bacteria, why using a plant would be more efficient?
I'm sure it'll be a paycheck or two after some pharmaceutical patents it.
Of all the vaccines to do this with, why polio?
We have darn near eradicated this surge from the face of the earth, in fact 1 of the three strains actually HAS been eradicated so far and one strain is nearly so. The infection rate for polio is down to double digits world wide, in fact we are seeing almost as many oral vaccine caused cases of polio than actual cases. If we can sustain the vaccination rates for just a bit longer and get the last few pockets of unvaccinated people taken care of, this could all be over in less than a decade.
Why do we need a new way to produce polio vaccines? Hopefully we won't need to keep producing it much longer..
welcome our new Plant Overlords.
I've been following the polio numbers week by week for some years now. (Polio eradication will be one of the great achievements of human history.)
This news is particularly important because this year for the first time ever "circulating vaccine derived polio virus" (cVDPV, where live weakened polio in vaccines has mutated back to virulence) is causing more polio cases than wild polio virus (WPV).
Here are the full-year numbers for the last few years:
WPV cVDPV
2011 583 67
2012 202 68
2013 416 65
2014 359 56
2015 74 32
2016 37 5
(2017 missing because the year hasn't yet finished.) Here are the numbers for start of year to approx 9 August:
WPV cVDPV
2014 138 31
2015 29 10
2016 19 3
2017 8 37
(I only have 2014 onwards ready to hand in week-by-week breakdown.) Mostly this is due to a major outbreak of cVDPV in Syria (30 cases).
(There is a delay of up to about 2 months between a polio case in the field and it getting reported to central authorities and added to the official numbers, but the numbers above are all what was reported at that time of year, so the comparison is fair.)
It is looking reasonable to hope that the last ever WPV case will be this year or next year, but cVDPV eradication is looking harder. Polio is a disease that can lurk asymptomatically in a population, so it will be three years after the last detection of WPV before it is declared eradicated. (Nigeria had over two years of being apparently polio free before a few cases re-emerged.)
There were three strains of WPV. WPV2 and WPV3 have been eradicated, but until recently vaccines were still vaccinating against WPV2, and it is this vaccine strain (cVDPV2) which is causing most of the problems (all of the cVDPV cases so far this year are cVDPV2.) Now WPV2 vaccine is not in the standard vaccinations, and is only used in response to a cVDPV2 outbreak.
The countries still with WPV endemic are Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Nigeria has had cases recently enough that we can't safely say it is free of WPV.
The countries which have had cVDPV cases in 2015 or later are Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Madagascar, Lao, Guinea, Ukraine, Myanmar, Nigeria.
Find more at
http://polioeradication.org/po...
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Isn't there a risk that if the body is presented with something that is benign which looks like Polio, then if that person comes into contact with polio the immunity system completely ignores it because it believes it to be benign.
If we start hijacking vaccine plants to make polio vaccine, what happens to all the people who need whatever vaccine the plant was making before it was hijacked?
I, too, read the title to mean 'plant' as in 'a manufacturing facility' not as in 'greed things with leaves'. And was all "how do you do that and what about the stuff the plant was supposed to be making?"
But, yes, green plants are better at folding some protiens than some mamilian cell lines are. Though I thought this was old news. I remember it being discussed a while back when I got into Folding@Home.
From the article:
Prof Lomonossoff told the BBC: "In an experiment with a Canadian company, they showed you could actually identify a new strain of virus and produce a candidate vaccine in three to four weeks.
Suppose the bird flu mutated, so that it spread easily between humans. Would making "a candidate vaccine in three to four weeks" be fast enough to prevent a disastrous pandemic?
Will this create a generation of autistic plants? Is this why my ficus ignores me?
Outwardly it looks almost identical to poliovirus but -- like the difference between a mannequin and person -- it is empty on the inside. It has all the features needed to train the immune system, but none of the weapons to cause an infection.
That's just what the plants WANT us to think. Today it's a vaccine, tomorrow it's a plant-borne pandemic. The Happening was a warning, people!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I am a mannequin, you insensitive clod!
Let's hope there are no "hermit crab" viruses out there that would use the shell for home.
E Proelio Veritas.
As anyone who studied at UEA knows the real work of the John Innes centre is triffid research.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Am only looking at 'outstanding' answers but good mix of experts providing informed answers.
Just wish there was upvoted facility here.
This is how that movie with the zombie plants started. Invest in flame throwers.
Has anyone confirmed this doesn't cause autism in the plants being used?
...a plant-born disease crosses over and becomes the next pandemic.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)