Can growing grass make COVID-19 vaccine?

On 24 February 2022, biopharmaceutical companies Medicago and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced that Health Canada has approved their Novel Coronavirus vaccine, marketed under the trade name COVIFENZ? .

Can growing grass make COVID-19 vaccine? It’s already been approved!

The vaccine is the world’s first plant-based human vaccine to be approved.

COVIFENZ? Produced by model plant “Bunsen tobacco”, the antigen is a virus-like particle composed of spike proteins and is used in conjunction with GSK’s pandemic adjuvant.

The vaccine is administered by two intramuscular injections 21 days apart at a single dose of 3.75 micrograms.

Vaccine storage conditions are 2 °C to 8 °C. COVIFENZ? Antigens will be manufactured in Canada and north Carolina in the United States.

Can growing grass make COVID-19 vaccine? It’s already been approved!

It uses plant bioreactors as part of the vaccine production system. This approach has the potential to produce multiple vaccines quickly and safely.

The technology to express foreign proteins in plants was established as early as 1986, and scientists worked for 35 years until this year’s first plant-based human vaccine, COVIFENZ? Finally approved.

Can growing grass make COVID-19 vaccine? It’s already been approved!

The name of this plant is Nicotiana Benthamiana. Isn’t it a strange name? It is an allotetraploid plant with 19 chromosomes, which is native to Australia and belongs to the solanaceae family, along with pepper, tomato, potato and cultivated tobacco.

In the past decade, benzoic tobacco has been considered as an important model plant in addition to Arabidopsis thaliana due to its extensive applications in plant-microbial interactions, identification of protein interactions and subcellular localization, metabolic regulation, vaccine production and synthetic biology.