New plant-based vaccine under investigation
21 Jun 2016 by Evoluted New Media
A plant-based polio vaccine, the first of its kind, could be created by a team led by the University of Leeds after a £1m grant from the World Health Organisation.
A plant-based polio vaccine, the first of its kind, could be created by a team led by the University of Leeds after a £1m grant from the World Health Organisation.
The grant will allow the group, comprised of universities and research centres, carry out further research to find the most suitable and effective way to create a polio vaccine, without using a form of the live virus itself. This is to eliminate any risk of the virus, currently used in vaccines, making its way into the wider world.
The project — ‘Generation of Virus Free Polio Vaccine’ — has created different methods of creating the vaccines and now work will begin into understanding which method is the most suitable for large-scale production.
Professor David Rowlands, from the University of Leeds, said: “We know that our approaches create stable vaccines that are effective against the virus in the lab. The next stage is to show how they can be manufactured cost effectively on the scale needed to replace current vaccines. The fundamental challenge is to build protein shells that are the same as the virus but that does not have any of its genetic material.”
Researchers have struggled in the past to created virus-like particles (VLPs) that are as stable as the complete virus. However, work undertaken at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) has found new ways to create polio VLPS that are as stable as the current inactivated polio vaccine. These VLPs provide equivalent or better immunity to polio infection as well as being able to be refrigerated for many months without significant loss of activity.
Dr Andrew Macadam, lead scientist at NIBSC, said: “The approach we developed was remarkably effective and worked for all three types of polio so may have applications in the design of vaccines against other virus diseases. The challenge now is to transfer these designs to production systems that can deliver large quantities of VLPs cheaply so that a vaccine for global use is feasible.”
The project group is made up of the University of Leeds, Reading and Oxford, NIBSC, the John Innes Centre and the Pirbright Institute.
