Charlotte Observer: Tobacco with some flu virus DNA to make people healthier – unless they smoke it.
This ran more than a week ago but I just happened upon it. In the Charlotte Observer is a switch on the usual tobacco and health report. ‘Special correspondent,’ which presumably means freelancer, Whitney L. J. Howell reports experimental plantings of an easily gene-modified tobacco plant in Research Triangle Park. A Canada-based company, using an Australian tobacco strain with thin and delicate leaves, plans to inculcate the plant leaves with synthetic genes inscribed with the sequences for emerging influenza strains, harvest the vegetation about week later, and separate out particles slightly resembling viruses (but incapable of propagating the disease), and use them as a vaccine. the idea is that production could ramp up fast to high volume.
It appears that the plants’ germ lines, or seeds, don’t get the new genes. They are planted directly into the leaves and expressed only there.
This seems to me a tad bizarre, but the story says the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA is putting money into it. Seems new, and I haven’t seen other reports on it. Tobacco is a standard experimental plant, so it is not jarring to people in the business to learn that it is a platform for such work.
A quick search doesn’t find other reporting of this specific project. However, an example of tobacco as basis for making “personalized vaccine” against a lot of things is found, from mid 2008, in a Reuters story by Julie Steenhuysen.
Grist for the Mill: Medicago Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
January 28th, 2011 at 3:15 am
Not the first time they’re looking into this:
“The tobacco is grown under very tightly controlled, sterile, hydroponic conditions. Special bacteria are used to infect the leaves of the plant; the bacteria cause those leaves to produce the protein we want. A hydroponic tobacco growing tray, roughly 10 feet by 10 feet, would yield sufficient protein for at least one million vaccine doses – the equivalent of using three million chicken eggs as a growth medium. ”
Source: http://www.darpa.mil/testimony/DARPAFlexiManufacturBWDtestimonyfinal.pdf
January 28th, 2011 at 2:26 pm
There’s also an article in this week’s New Yorker about the Pentagon’s efforts against flu, including work using tobacco plants to make vaccines.
The full article is available online only to subscribers:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/31/110131fa_fact_hoffman
January 29th, 2011 at 3:09 pm
David Hoffman in “GOING VIRAL: The Pentagon takes on a new enemy: swine flu.” in the Jan. 31 issue of The New Yorker covers using tobacco plants to make vaccines… his story puts this work in the larger context.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/31/110131fa_fact_hoffman#ixzz1CSNH5lq5