Seed-based System for Cost-Effective Production of Vaccine Against
Chronic Respiratory Disease in Chickens
Abstract
The production of vaccines in plant cells, termed as plant-made
pharmaceuticals or molecular farming, is a promising technology.
Compared to mammalian cell lines, like HEK293 and CHO as established
platform, plants can be grown cost effectively on a large-scale without
necessitating any sophisticated technologies. An innovative application
of this alternative system is the production of vaccines in edible
tissues that can be consumed orally to deliver protein antigen without
any further processing. In this project we reported stable expression of
TM-1 protein of MG as vaccine candidate antigen against Chronic
Respiratory Disease (CRD) in wheat seeds tissues. The molecular and
Immunoblotting analysis confirmed the integration of recombinant protein
of 41.8 kDa with expression level of 1.03mg/g DW in endosperm tissues.
When orally delivered, the plant made vaccine were highly effective in
terms of developing antibodies in chicken without any detectable weight
loss. Two doses of orally delivered plant-made TM-1 vaccine candidate
elicited an immune response and protective effect against MG virus
challenge at the level comparable to commercially available inactivated
vaccine against CRD. Our study demonstrated that plant-made vaccines are
not only safe but also similarly effective to commercially available
vaccines.