Abstract
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has killed more than 37,000 people in Italy and has caused widespread socioeconomic disruption. Urgent measures are needed to contain and control the virus, particularly diagnostic kits for detection and surveillance, therapeutics to reduce mortality among the severely affected, and vaccines to protect the remaining population. Here we discuss the potential role of plant molecular farming in the rapid and scalable supply of protein antigens as reagents and vaccine candidates, antibodies for virus detection and passive immunotherapy, other therapeutic proteins, and virus-like particles as novel vaccine platforms. We calculate the amount of infrastructure and production capacity needed to deal with predictable subsequent waves of COVID-19 in Italy by pooling expertise in plant molecular farming, epidemiology and the Italian health system. We calculate the investment required in molecular farming infrastructure that would enable us to capitalize on this technology, and provide a roadmap for the development of diagnostic reagents and biopharmaceuticals using molecular farming in plants to complement production methods based on the cultivation of microbes and mammalian cells.
Highlights
Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a new virus responsible for the COVID19 pandemic, which is the worst public health crisis of this century1
To determine the amount of vaccine antigen needed for a primary prevention approach in Italy (Table 2), we assumed that the dose of a soluble subunit vaccine would be the same as that recommended for the approved quadrivalent influenza vaccine, i.e., one shot of 40 μg of each antigen per individual, and that the dose of a virus-like particles (VLPs) vaccine would be the same as that recommended for the VLP-based hepatitis B vaccine, i.e., one shot of 120 μg per individual (Mulangu et al, 2019)
We have shown how plant molecular farming could contribute to an effective response strategy in a country like Italy, where expertise in this field is mainly restricted to the research sector
Summary
Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a new virus responsible for the COVID19 pandemic, which is the worst public health crisis of this century. To determine the amount of vaccine antigen needed for a primary prevention approach in Italy (Table 2), we assumed that the dose of a soluble subunit vaccine would be the same as that recommended for the approved quadrivalent influenza vaccine, i.e., one shot of 40 μg of each antigen per individual, and that the dose of a VLP vaccine would be the same as that recommended for the VLP-based hepatitis B vaccine, i.e., one shot of 120 μg per individual (Mulangu et al, 2019) Such calculation is consistent with recent Phase 1 trials with the recombinant SARSCoV-2 Spike protein adjuvated vaccine NVX-CoV2373, which showed promising immunogenic response and tolerability with an antigen dose of 50 μg, split in two administrations of 25 μg each 21 days apart (Keech et al, 2020). Plant viruses could be used to display multiple immunogenic and immunomodulatory peptide epitopes (Lico et al, 2012a; Santoni et al, 2020), providing an effective strategy to induce simultaneous immune responses against different targets and to stimulate different components of the immune system – innate and adaptive, humoral and cell-mediated (Lico et al, 2013; Balke and Zeltins, 2019)
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