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.

Comments

Original press release?

[intellitech]

I think this might be it:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub...

The breakthrough we've been waiting for

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Polio eradication progress

[Michael Woodhams]

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...