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

INtriguing, and I wonder about Flu

[goombah99]

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.

Re:INtriguing, and I wonder about Flu

[arth1]

With plants one presumably avoids that and the risk of a human catching a plant virus seem negligible.

It's rare, but not unheard of that viruses jump entire kingdoms. A tobacco ringspot virus jumped to bees, for example.

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.

Re:The breakthrough we've been waiting for

[alvinrod]

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, but it's still Vegan friendly. Can we find a way to do this with cows instead?

Re:The breakthrough we've been waiting for

[ShanghaiBill]

There are GMO salmon. There are also GMO fluorescent tropical fish available at my local Petco.

oh sweet irony!

[Gravis Zero]

Now if only we could convince idiots to let doctors inoculate their children.

Re:Why a plant?

[rogoshen1]

Well for starters, you never know exactly how a given technological process might be used in the future.

Re:Why the polio vaccine?

[Jarik C-Bol]

Because we know what an effective polio vaccine looks like. If we are able to replicate an effective polio vaccine using this new technique, the knowledge obtained creating it produces a framework around which to build the process of making vaccines for diseases that we currently do NOT have vaccines for.
Much the same as how there are many proofs for the Pythagorean theorem. The more ways to the correct answer, the more thoroughly the problem is solved, and the understanding gained developing those proofs lends itself to being able to solve other more complex problems.

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...

Re:Polio eradication progress

[Michael Woodhams]

No, your interpretation is entirely wrong.

cVDPV cases this year are in line with what we've had for the last decade. It is just that WPV cases are plummeting, so where cVDPV used to be a small percentage of cases, now it is a large percentage. Futhermore, most of the cases are in Syria, where civil war has created an environment conducive to outbreaks, which is not the fault of the vaccine.

Although the vaccine is causing damage, it is preventing much more. In 1980 there were about 400,000 cases per year worldwide (already a reduction on pre-vaccination cases from prior to 1950s). Vaccination is what has brought us down to where we are today, with under 100 cases per year.

The polio eradication effort is trying to address the cVDPV problem. About a year ago, the removed the WPV2 strain from standard vaccinations, and now vaccinate for WPV2 only in response to cVDPV2 outbreaks. It is too soon to know if this is having an effect.

It is beyond my competence to know whether current vaccination technology and strategy can eradicate cVDPV. There is an alternative vaccination (IPV, inactivated polio vaccine), which is injected, compared to the attenuated oral polio vaccine, OPV, which is the current workhorse of eradication efforts. However, IPV mostly prevents symptoms rather than preventing spread, so it is not so good for eradication (and is harder to deliver in poor countries.) (OPV causes immune response primarily in the gut, IPV causes immune response primarily in the blood, which allows transmission through fecal/oral route to be unbroken.) I understand IPV will be used in the final stages of eradication because of the cVDPV problem, but I don't know details.

The current vaccination strategy can eradicate WPV. WPV2 and WPV3 have been eradicated, and WPV1 is on the brink.

Re:Polio eradication progress

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's no longer a technical problem to eradicate polio. It's a political one. There was a very strong effort to eradicate it which failed in 2006, because of rumors that the vaccine was actually a sterilization agent. Unfortunately, the fear was not entirely unjustified. There *have* been fraudulent vaccines used to force birth control on women in the middle east, so it was not an unthinkable rumor for people in a poor and information poor place like Nigeria. The fact that fake vaccines were used by a country seen by so much of the Middle East as a target of religious anger made it all the worse.

* http://www.salon.com/2013/01/2...

I'm afraid that in an area with poverty, war, and ethnic strife, getting vaccines to all is very difficult. The vaccines are also somewhat dangerous to make, expensive, and have a very limited shelf life, so the doses to eradicate polio _expired_ in the Nigerian effort in 2006.

I do hope that being able to manufacture vaccines less expensively, more safely, and where a native population can get a better view of the manufacture and assure its safety for their own concerns will help the population accept the vaccines enough to eradicate polio.