Abstract
The emerging human coronavirus infections in the 21st century remain a major public health crisis causing worldwide impact and challenging the global health care system. The virus is circulating in several zoonotic hosts and continuously evolving, causing occasional outbreaks due to spill-over events occurring between animals and humans. Hence, the development of effective vaccines or therapeutic interventions is the current global priority in order to reduce disease severity, frequent outbreaks, and to prevent future infections. Vaccine development for newly emerging pathogens takes a long time, which hinders rapid immunization programs. The concept of plant-based pharmaceuticals can be readily applied to meet the recombinant protein demand by means of transient expression. Plants are evolved as an expression platform, and they bring a combination of unique interests in terms of rapid scalability, flexibility, and economy for industrial-scale production of effective vaccines, diagnostic reagents, and other biopharmaceuticals. Plants offer safe biologics to fulfill emergency demands, especially during pandemic situations or outbreaks caused by emerging strains. This review highlights the features of a plant expression platform for producing recombinant biopharmaceuticals to combat coronavirus infections with emphasis on COVID-19 vaccine and biologics development.
Highlights
The emergence of pathogenic human coronavirus-associated diseases has been reported in the 21st century, with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2003 and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012
We are witnessing the third deadly human coronavirus outbreak, which started with the reporting of the unknown pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, in December 2019
COVID-19 vaccines were developed in different platforms and approved for emergency use including: CoronaVac, a whole-inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine developed by Beijing-based Sinovac Biotech company [65]; inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, BBV152 (Bharat Biotech) [66]; mRNA-1273 (Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna) [67]; BNT162b2 (BioNTech/Pfizer) [68]; ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AZD1222), a non-replicating SARS-CoV-2 viral-vectored vaccine developed by AstraZeneca [69]; and NVX-CoV2373, an S protein-based vaccine candidate developed by Novavax [70]
Summary
The emergence of pathogenic human coronavirus-associated diseases has been reported in the 21st century, with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2003 and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012. These viruses spread rapidly among humans worldwide, and the development of life-threatening respiratory infections caused morbidity and death in hospitalized patients, with 10% and 35% overall mortality rates, respectively [1,2]. Recombinant proteins, including vaccine candidates and monoclonal antibodies against infectious diseases, especially for Ebola, HIV, and influenza, have been produced in plants, purified, and are currently in preclinical/clinical applications [12,13,14,15,16]. The current status of plant-derived vaccines and immunotherapeutics against coronavirus, with emphasis on SARS-CoV-2, has been provided
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