Technocrat

Cheap Vaccines Produced from Plants

zogger
Mon Aug 04 19:04:00 -0700 2008
Health+and+Medicine
manage

Stanford researchers have developed a way to rapidly make a cheap vaccine from plants. So far the vaccine they have produced is for treating a specific cancer, and involves taking some of the patients own unique antibodies they are producing naturally to try and fight the disease, then adapting them to a virus that they infect the plant with, the plant in turn produces tremendous quantities of the antibody "vaccine", which can then be extracted and used in treatment. There are no side effects as with conventional chemotherapy and they think this procedure can be extended into other diseases.

Not only is the technology fast, cheap and safe, but Levy said there's reason to expect that the plant-grown antibodies will generate a stronger immune response than those made in animal cells. Both plant and animal cells attach sugars to antibodies and other proteins during biochemical processing, but the plant and animal sugars are different. The difference might prompt a more robust immune response to plant-grown antibodies, Levy said.

Cheap Vaccines Produced from Plants
Bhima
Tue Aug 05 05:36:17 -0700 2008
 manage

I think what explains this and makes it interesting is that they are using the tobacco plant.  A lot is known about tobacco owing the rather intense study done by tobacco companies.  So there are a lot of interesting things going on with tobacco, that are completely unrelated to giving yourself cancer by smoking.  I don’t remember where I read it but one group is growing indicator chemistry in tobacco plants.

 

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