Abstract
An alarming increase in emergence of antibiotic resistance among pathogens worldwide has become a serious threat to our ability to treat infectious diseases according to the World Health Organization. Extensive use of antibiotics by livestock producers promotes the spread of new resistant strains, some of zoonotic concern, which increases food-borne illness in humans and causes significant economic burden on healthcare systems. Furthermore, consumer preferences for meat/poultry/fish produced without the use of antibiotics shape today’s market demand. So, it is viewed as inevitable by the One Health Initiative that humans need to reduce the use of antibiotics and turn to alternative, improved means to control disease: vaccination and prophylactics. Besides the intense research focused on novel therapeutic molecules, both these strategies rely heavily on the availability of cost-effective, efficient and scalable production platforms which will allow large-volume manufacturing for vaccines, antibodies and other biopharmaceuticals. Within this context, plant-based platforms for production of recombinant therapeutic proteins offer significant advantages over conventional expression systems, including lack of animal pathogens, low production costs, fast turnaround and response times and rapid, nearly-unlimited scalability. Also, because dried leaves and seeds can be stored at room temperature for lengthy periods without loss of recombinant proteins, plant expression systems have the potential to offer lucrative benefits from the development of edible vaccines and prophylactics, as these would not require “cold chain” storage and transportation, and could be administered in mass volumes with minimal processing. Several biotechnology companies currently have developed and adopted plant-based platforms for commercial production of recombinant protein therapeutics. In this manuscript, we outline the challenges in the process of livestock immunization as well as the current plant biotechnology developments aimed to address these challenges.
Highlights
The health and well-being of food-bearing animals is a major preoccupation for any livestock, poultry or fish producer
It can be reasonable to assume that the availability of antibiotics will become increasingly constrained as legitimate public alarm over the looming spectre of catastrophic antibiotic resistance in human medicine is translated into action at the farm level
5.1 Storage/Shelf life/Purification Plant-based expression systems raise the possibility that antigens or antibodies can be produced in a form that is stable during storage and is amenable to extraction and purification procedures [43]
Summary
The health and well-being of food-bearing animals is a major preoccupation for any livestock, poultry or fish producer. More restricted use of veterinary antibiotics will result from market-driven forces, as consumers increasingly demand antibiotic-free food, and through the policies of governments and codes of practice of veterinary practitioners that promote judicious use [2]. Within this evolving environment, newly developed vaccines and immunotherapeutic agents offer the potential to lessen the need for antibiotics for disease control, and offer veterinary practitioners much needed tools [3]. Specific aspects discussed will include high-level recombinant protein production in plant-based systems, the ability to use unpurified material for treatment, the possibility of oral rather than parenteral delivery, low cost of protein/vaccine production, very short turnaround time from conception to large-scale manufacturing, and the ability to “stack” genes encoding antigens and adjuvants to create potent multi-target vaccines in a single preparation
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