Current Developments and Future Prospects for Plant-Made Biopharmaceuticals Against Rabies

Abstract

Rabies is a prevalent health problem in developing countries. Although vaccines and immunoglobulin treatments are available, their cost and multiple-dose treatments restrict availability. During the last two decades, plants have served as a low-cost platform for biopharmaceuticals production and have been applied to fight against rabies during the last two decades. Herein, I provide a description of the state of the art in the development of plant-made pharmaceuticals against rabies and identify key prospects for the field in terms of novel strategies, immunogen design, and therapeutic antibodies production.

Enhanced transport of plant‐produced rabies single‐chain antibody‐RVG peptide fusion protein across an in cellulo blood–brain barrier device

“…Although there are several rabies vaccines and antibodies developed from plants (Hefferon, ; Rosales‐Mendoza, ; Shahid and Daniell, ), here we show for the first time that a fusion protein with the RVG peptide can be produced in plants. Producing the RVG peptide fusion protein in this manner will remove the conjugation step and potentially reduce production costs.…”

Production of vaccines for treatment of infectious diseases by transgenic plants

“…Vaccines currently available on the market are obtained by propagating fixed Rabies virus strains in various animal cell cultures or chicken embryos (Starodubova et al, 2015). Despite being safe and efficacious, vaccines produced in such way can greatly vary between different producers, their efficiency can be significantly reduced by storage and transportation, are very costly, can sometimes cause adverse side effects and require 3 -5 doses to provide sufficient immune protection (Rosales-Mendoza, 2015). In the last 20 years there has been a lot of research and progress in developing the fourth generation of rabies vaccines based on rabies glycoprotein (G protein) (Starodubova et al, 2015).…”

Modern immunobiological preparations for veterinary medicine

“…В дальнейшем удалось повысить уровень продукции G-белка в растительных клетках листьев табака путем оптимизации кодонов в гене G-белка и использования сигнала удержания эндоплазматического ретикулума (ЭР), что способствовало накоплению белка в ЭР, и приводило к значительному повышению урожайности. Кукуруза так же была использована для экспрессии гликопротеина G вируса бешенства штамма Внуково [23,24,29 [4,12,13].…”