Tobacco plants could be key to Ebola vaccine

Consider the vaccine. It is administered to hundreds of thousands of screaming infants and toddlers each year; its advertisements are ubiquitous in store and pharmacy windows during flu season. Vaccines are also commonly grown and incubated in the eggs of mammalian animals, to be harvested and made into the fluid which we inject into our upper arms. But researchers have found that there may be a cheaper and better way to produce vaccines, and the answer lies in the form of the tobacco plant.

“Biopharming,” or creating pharmaceutical drugs through the genetic modification of plants, has recently been thrust into the spotlight due to the recent Ebola outbreak. The promise of using tobacco plants to create a vaccine arose in August when two medical missionaries were given an experimental drug, ZMapp. Created by Mapp Biopharmaceutical, ZMapp was effective on rhesus macaques infected with Ebola; it had never been tested on a human subject. The missionaries who had contracted Ebola, Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, were the first to ever try the drug.

ZMapp seemed extremely effective on Writebol and Brantly. Both of their conditions improved dramatically a single hour after treatment with ZMapp. The missionaries eventually healed and were discharged to their families.

ZMapp is not a completely novel drug; rather, it was created as a combination of antibodies which were optimized from two previous antibody cocktails. Xiangguo Qiu, a biologist at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada and part of the team that created ZMapp, noted that the new drug seemed to be much more effective than any other form of Ebola medication on the market.

The process used to create ZMapp is time-consuming and expensive. The promise of tobacco plants is that incubating the vaccine in them could decrease the price of creating ZMapp. Kentucky BioProcessing, a pharmaceutical company in Owensboro, Kentucky, has been working in conjunction with Mapp Biopharmaceutical to develop a ZMapp serum using tobacco plants.

Medicago Inc., a biopharmaceutical company in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina, has already confirmed the viability of creating simpler flu vaccines using tobacco plants. The company created 10 million vaccines over a 30-day period using genetically-modified tobacco plants at a very low cost. They eventually estimated that they could scale their operation to 100 million doses at less than 40 cents per dose. Researchers at the University of Louisville’s Owensboro Cancer Research Program have also used Nicotiana benthamiana, a close plant relative to tobacco, to create vaccines to prevent HIV transmission.

As of now, there is only one biopharmaceutical drug created from a plant which has been approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration: taliglucerase alfa, or Elelyso, an enzyme-replacement therapy for Gaucher’s Disease manufactured from carrot cells.

If the biopharming experiment were to be a success, the Ebola vaccine could become the catalyst for many of the drugs and vaccines to be created through plants. Vaccines for influenza, Ebola and HIV may one day be commonly created via the conduit of tobacco plants.