Overview of Plant-Made Vaccine Antigens against Malaria

Abstract

<jats:p>This paper is an overview of vaccine antigens against malaria produced in plants. Plant-based expression systems represent an interesting production platform due to their reduced manufacturing costs and high scalability. At present, different<jats:italic>Plasmodium</jats:italic>antigens and expression strategies have been optimized in plants. Furthermore, malaria antigens are one of the few examples of eukaryotic proteins with vaccine value expressed in plants, making plant-derived malaria antigens an interesting model to analyze. Up to now, malaria antigen expression in plants has allowed the complete synthesis of these vaccine antigens, which have been able to induce an active immune response in mice. Therefore, plant production platforms offer wonderful prospects for improving the access to malaria vaccines.</jats:p>

Optimized Blanching Reduces the Host Cell Protein Content and Substantially Enhances the Recovery and Stability of Two Plant-Derived Malaria Vaccine Candidates

“…For the prevention of poverty-related diseases, millions of vaccine doses need to be produced at low cost ( Waheed et al, 2012 ). Plant-based expression systems have the potential to match these requirements ( Rybicki, 2010 ) and vaccine candidate antigens from several viral, bacterial and protozoan pathogens have been produced successfully using such platforms ( Daniell et al, 2001 ; Clemente and Corigliano, 2012 ). The first plant-derived malaria vaccine candidate has recently commenced a phase I, dose escalation, first-in-human study (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02013687).…”

Detailed functional characterization of glycosylated and nonglycosylated variants of malaria vaccine candidate PfAMA1 produced in Nicotiana benthamiana and analysis of growth inhibitory responses in rabbits

“…Plant-based expression systems have been used as robust, scalable and cost-efficient platforms for the production of recombinant vaccine antigens derived from various viral, bacterial and protozoan pathogens (Clemente and Corigliano, 2012;Fischer et al, 2013;Waheed et al, 2012). Following oral and also parenteral immunization, many of these plant-derived vaccine antigens proved efficacious by eliciting neutralizing antibodies, which conferred protection in vaccination challenge experiments (Clemente and Corigliano, 2012;Rybicki, 2010).…”

Malaria vaccine candidate antigen targeting the pre‐erythrocytic stage ofPlasmodium falciparumproduced at high level in plants

“…Plants offer a production system for recombinant vaccines with the potential to match these prerequisites in terms of robustness, scalability, and cost-efficiency [3,4]. Using different plantbased expression platforms, antigens from various viral, bacterial, and protozoan pathogens [5] also from different Plasmodium species [6][7][8] have been produced successfully. Many of these plant-derived antigens elicited neutralizing antibody responses following oral and also parenteral immunization, conferring various degrees of protection in vaccination challenge experiments.…”