Cigarettes kill more than four million people a year, but a cousin of the tobacco plant could help protect the rest of us from a major flu pandemic. This February, Darpa, the Pentagon’s R&D branch, awarded $40 million to Texas A&M University and pharmaceutical manufacturer G-Con to launch Project GreenVax, an effort to speed vaccine production by growing it in tobacco. First, scientists engineer bacteria to carry the latest flu markers and wash them over Nicotiana benthamiana tobacco plants. The bacteria dump the DNA into the plant’s cells, which follow its instructions to churn out the flu protein. Technicians then grind up the leaves to extract the protein. Injected into a person, the protein works like any vaccine, training the body to attack the flu virus.
The entire process is about a quarter of the cost and three times as fast as the conventional method, growing live viruses in chicken eggs, a system so sluggish that it contributed to vaccine shortages last fall. Next year the team plans to do a demonstration production run of 10 million H1N1 vaccines—about 10 percent of a seasonal supply—and start a tobacco-made vaccine in clinical trials, which the vaccine must pass before it could be distributed.
Full story: Tobacco May Keep Us from Catching the Flu
