With flu season only a sneeze away, the vaccines that swell arms across North America this year will still be made with chicken eggs. However, a flu pandemic could call a Canadian biopharma company into action. In clinical trials now, their method uses tobacco plants to produce flu vaccines affordably in weeks rather than months.
"This one little plant can do 50 doses," said Andy Sheldon, CEO of the Canadian biopharma company Medicago that is developing tobacco-based vaccines. "Whereas when you're looking at one egg, which is what people use when they're making influenza vaccines, they can get about two doses." Most flu vaccines remain egg-based, manufactured using living chicken embryos. This technique has limits, though. It makes vaccine production challenging to scale up and difficult to change when new viruses emerge.
The 2009 swine flu pandemic had gone through a second wave before a vaccine was ready. NEWS: What To Expect From The Flu This Fall Medicago, with help from U.S. defense grants, is one of several companies seeking a more effective replacement for eggs. Plants have been eyed as an alternative since the early 1990s, according to pioneering plant researcher Charles Arntzen. Currently the co-director for Arizona State University's Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, Arntzen said that several other plant species, including tomatoes, had initially been studied as possibilities.
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