Plant-based vaccines could help expand access across Africa according to a new Imperial report.
Vaccines developed in plants instead of mammalian cell cultures offer an agile, low-cost technology that could boost local manufacturing and strengthen existing healthcare systems and future pandemic preparedness. Researchers are able to make the plants produce vaccine proteins, which mimic viruses. The vaccine proteins are then extracted and purified.
Vaccine manufacturing in plants is also twice as fast as common traditional methods. This could enable researchers, manufacturers and health authorities to respond quickly to potential future pandemics and disease outbreaks
Africa currently produces less than one per cent of the world's total vaccine supply and countries on the continent are vulnerable to vaccine shortages and global supply chain disruptions.
Local manufacturing would significantly improve access to vaccines and would buffer African countries against shocks to supply chains and the threat of shortages.
The vaccine insight was published in a new STEM Development Impact Memo authored by Imperial's Professor Faith Osier, Chair in Malaria Immunology and Vaccinology, and co-authors Tsepo Tsekoa from South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and David Jarvis from the Liselo Labs.
An international team, brought together by the Imperial-led Chanjo Hub, is working to take laboratory-scale plant-based vaccine manufacture into full-scale production.
The Chanjo Hub, part of the UK Vaccines Network and funded by UK Research and Innovation, aims to build a network of development and manufacturing organisations in Africa that offer a range of platforms to rapidly respond to diverse pathogens and disease.
Professor Osier said: "Vaccine manufacturing requires its own ecosystem in which it can thrive."
The memo was launched at the 12th African Congress of Immunology Conference in Benin.
Download the impact memo on vaccine innovations.
Solutions to development challenges
STEM Development Impact Memos offer policy makers and stakeholders insight into projects in Imperial's Global Development Hub and their real-world impact. The focus is on the scale-up potential of a science, technology, policy or health solution to development challenges.
Imperial's Global Development Hub is a platform to promote and support Imperial's sustainable development research, education and innovation. The Hub supports Imperial's contribution to the United Nations Sustainable Agenda 2030, and our work more broadly with some of the most vulnerable and marginalised in societies where multiple global challenges are acutely concentrated.
