Abstract
The Ebola virus (EBOV) epidemic indicated a great need for prophylactic and therapeutic strategies. The use of plants for the production of biopharmaceuticals is a concept being adopted by the pharmaceutical industry, with an enzyme for human use currently commercialized since 2012 and some plant-based vaccines close to being commercialized. Although plant-based antibodies against EBOV are under clinical evaluation, the development of plant-based vaccines against EBOV essentially remains an unexplored area. The current technologies for the production of plant-based vaccines include stable nuclear expression, transient expression mediated by viral vectors, and chloroplast expression. Specific perspectives on how these technologies can be applied for developing anti-EBOV vaccines are provided, including possibilities for the design of immunogens as well as the potential of the distinct expression modalities to produce the most relevant EBOV antigens in plants considering yields, posttranslational modifications, production time, and downstream processing.
Highlights
The last Zaire Ebola virus (EBOV) epidemic outbreak in Guinea, which began in December 2013, quickly spread and six West-African countries were greatly affected (Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal)
Plant-based platforms constitute an attractive technology with the following attributes: (i) since the use of sophisticated bioreactors and complex downstream processing are avoided, the cost of a plantderived product is 10–50 times lower than products derived from the fermentation with Escherichia coli [9] and 140 times lower when compared to baculovirus-infected insect cells [10]; (ii) high biosynthetic capacity derived from a machinery that performs folding, assembly, and glycosylation; (iii) the plant systems offer high safety in the sense that they are not hosts of human or animal pathogens, in contrast to mammalian-based production systems where the risk of contamination with viruses and prions exists
Phase I and II clinical trials have been conducted, and the results showed that rVSV-Zaire ebolavirus (ZEBOV) is immunogenic and mild to moderate reactogenic. rVSV-ZEBOV used at 1–5 × 107 plaque-forming units (PFU) (Phase I) provoke fever (25%) and oligoarthritis (22%) in vaccinated volunteers [6]
Summary
The last Zaire Ebola virus (EBOV) epidemic outbreak in Guinea, which began in December 2013, quickly spread and six West-African countries were greatly affected (Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal). There have been reports of cases within health-care workers from the USA, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The overall case incidence has dropped, and no reports on confirmed cases during the last week of December 2015 were generated. According to a report on December 27, 2015, there have been 25,637 confirmed, probable, or suspected cases of EBOV disease (EVD) in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone (Figure 1), with over 11,000 reported deaths, which surpasses all previous EBOV outbreaks combined (World Health Organization).
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