Rapid-response vaccines from Dow
of the US government, that could hasten the time it takes to make
vaccines in response to a new epidemic or biological attack.
The aim is to develop a vaccine production technology based on plants that could be used to turn around large-scale batches in as little as three months. This would speed up the response to emerging infectious disease threats, from a new strain of pandemic flu through to the deliberate use of pathogens such as anthrax or Ebola against human targets.
If successful, the project could have spin-off benefits for the pharmaceutical industry. Companies could potentially license the system to shorten the development and production times of their own vaccine programmes.
The US National Institutes of Health is supporting the project to the tune of $5.7 million (€4.5m) over the next four years. It is focusing on a new plant viral particle technology, with vaccine protein production taking place on leaves of greenhouse-grown plants.
Dow is working with the Fraunhofer USA Centre for Molecular Biotechnology to co-develop the technology, and with the University of Maryland to provide screening for vaccine efficacy.
Speed of production is the most significant advantage of the plant-based system, according to Carolyn Fritz, Dow's global business director for Industrial Biotechnology.
"We anticipate that our plant technology will cut production time to three or four months, reduce cost, and produce effective and safe vaccines that can be delivered by capsule or nasal spray. This would be a big improvement over existing technology," said Fritz. Current vaccine production methods mean that it can take nine-12 months to make a batch.
Meanwhile, the plant-based vaccine system will reduce the risk of contamination by animal pathogens, according to Barry Marrs, executive director of Fraunhofer USA, which is contributing the technology.
Fraunhofer USA is part of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, a leading non-profit contract research organization in Europe, with annual revenues of €1 billion.
Dow has been steadily building up a broad portfolio of technologies in the area of plant-based protein production.
Last November, it teamed up with Germany's greenovation Biotech to develop ways of manufacturing therapeutic proteins such as monoclonal antibodies in plants. And earlier in 2003, the company entered into an agreement to manufacture a potential drug for cancer in transgenic plants developed by Sunol Molecular. This agreement covers production of the protein in plants and a comparison with a version grown in mammalian cell culture.
Meanwhile, in 2002, Dow acquired key patents in glycosylation and began collaborating with Plant Research International of Wageningen, the Netherlands, to speed development of therapeutic proteins with mammalian-like glycan structures in transgenic plants.
