Abstract
Infectious diseases pose an increasing risk to health, especially in developing countries. Vaccines are available to either cure or prevent many of these diseases. However, there are certain limitations related to these vaccines, mainly the costs, which make these vaccines mostly unaffordable for people in resource poor countries. These costs are mainly related to production and purification of the products manufactured from fermenter-based systems. Plastid biotechnology has become an attractive platform to produce biopharmaceuticals in large amounts and cost-effectively. This is mainly due to high copy number of plastids DNA in mature chloroplasts, a characteristic particularly important for vaccine production in large amounts. An additional advantage lies in the maternal inheritance of plastids in most plant species, which addresses the regulatory concerns related to transgenic plants. These and many other aspects of plastids will be discussed in the present review, especially those that particularly make these green biofactories an attractive platform for vaccine production. A summary of recent vaccine antigens against different human diseases expressed in plastids will also be presented.
Highlights
Increase in the rate of infectious diseases is an escalating problem in both developed and developing world
There are mainly two methods that are used for plastid genome transformation: polyethylene glycol (PEG)-mediated transformation and gene gun-mediated transformation
Different strategies have been adopted over time to enhance the foreign protein expression in chloroplasts attaining a very high amount of 72% of total leaf protein (TLP) from tobacco leaves (Ruhlman et al, 2010)
Summary
Increase in the rate of infectious diseases is an escalating problem in both developed and developing world. Main factors are global warming, lack of healthcare facilities, and costly preventive measures or treatments. In developed countries, enhanced rate of infectious diseases may possibly be prevented by the availability of good healthcare facilities, cleaner resources and clean environment. In developing countries, where 2.2 billion people lived on less than US $2 a day in 2011 (World Bank, 2015), spread of infectious agents could be faster due to the reason that a large population is not able to afford costs related to treatments of these diseases. Poor sanitation, malnutrition, use of unclean water and lack of precautionary measures at government levels are additional major contributors to the increase in the risks of infectious diseases. Plastid-derived Vaccines Against Human Diseases of developing countries, it is important that these preventive/treatment strategies should be affordable and costeffective. Alternate strategies needs to be opted to cover the shortcomings of vaccines in use
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