Research and Markets: This Special Focus Issue Includes 13 Manuscripts Spanning Most of the Issues Involved In Plant-Based Vaccine Production, Including Intellectual Property Issues

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/c3b91f/plantderived_vacc) has announced the addition of Expert Reviews Ltd's new report "Plant-derived Vaccines" to their offering.

The application of recombinant technology to plants has led to major advances in plant biology, allowing production of genetically modified plants that are optimized for yield and/or resistant to pathogens/pesticides. New technologies have enabled the development of crop and non-crop plants that can express pharmaceutical-grade proteins (including glycosylated proteins). Plant expression systems have major advantages over other prokaryotic and eukaryotic expression systems in terms of speed, costs as well as safety. Plants can be efficiently used as bioreactors in transient systems driven by well-contained infectious vectors, or in stable transgenic systems based on nuclear or plastidial transformation.

A special application of plants as bioreactors is their use to express antigenic molecules to be administered as vaccines. In this special issue on plant-based vaccines, we are reviewing the techniques employed and goals achieved in this field from different angles. Plants are used to produce not only immunogens, but also adjuvants, microbicides and monoclonal antibodies. Plant expression systems cover the whole range of tools needed for an effective preventive, as well as therapeutic immunotherapy.

This Special Focus Issue of the peer-reviewed journal Expert Review of Vaccines, includes 13 manuscripts spanning most of the issues involved in plant-based vaccine production, including intellectual property issues. Besides the detailed description of antigen expressions in different plant systems, adjuvant productions as well as plant glycosylation of proteins are also analyzed. The first six articles deal with general aspects of the plant systems used for the production of pharmaceuticals, and the latter seven articles describe specific vaccine approaches pursued in plants.

Key Topics Covered:

EDITORIAL:

• PharmaPlant: the new frontier in vaccines

REVIEWS:

• Molecular farming, patents and access to medicines
• Plant-made immunogens and effective delivery strategies
• Plant glycans: friend or foe in vaccine development?
• In planta production of plant-derived and non-plant-derived adjuvants
• Transient expression systems for plant-derived biopharmaceuticals
• Plant-derived vaccines and other therapeutics produced in contained systems
• Chloroplasts as expression platform for plant-produced vaccines
• HPV vaccines in plant
• Plant-based anti-HIV-1 strategies: vaccine molecules and antiviral approaches
• Development of plant-based mucosal vaccines against wide-spread infectious diseases
• Plant-based vaccines against human hepatitis B virus
• Plant-made pharmaceuticals for the prevention and treatment of autoimmune diseases: where are we?
• Current status of plant-made vaccines for veterinary purposes

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/c3b91f/plantderived_vacc