IT Blog

For the past 80 years, eggs have been a main ingredient in vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, the flu, and others. Typically, modified genetic material from a virus is inserted into an egg’s proteins, and those proteins are then introduced into the human body to “teach” it an immune response. But since each egg must be modified individually, the lag time for egg-based vaccines can literally be a killer. In the U.S., for example, the CDC must predict in January what strains of the flu will erupt nearly a year later, to give drugmakers time to manufacture enough inoculations. A handful of companies, however, are pioneering vaccines developed in plants, which can be grown and treated in bulk. Using a cousin of the tobacco plant (nicotiana benthamiana), biomedical companies Kentucky Bioprocessing (KBP) and Medicago have been pursuing plant-based flu vaccines for years, and are currently working on COVID-19 immunizations. The companies also both began human trials…