Plant based oral vaccines for human and animal pathogens – a new era of prophylaxis: current and future perspectives

Vaccination remains a high priority for animal disease prevention and control especially on account of rising antimicrobial resistant strains of pathogens and frightening increase in new emerging and reemerging pathogens. Traditional vaccines have limitation like residual virulence, need of extensive safety precautions, production difficulty and huge initial investments. Additionally, they are inefficient in producing a protective response at mucosal surfaces such as of lungs and intestinal tract, the actual sites where disease agents enter the body. Recent advances in plant molecular farming has resulted in genetic manipulations in plants to make them bioreactors for production of various recombinant proteins, by using infectious vectors or stable transgenic systems, which formulate the edible/oral vaccines. Such plant-based oral/edible vaccines have several advantages like they are functionally similar to conventional vaccines, demonstrate extended storage period in food grains, are heat-stable and does not require cold storage, eliminate need for expensive purification steps, are free from contaminating pathogens, can be produced in large scale in a time bound fashion and their delivery is easier with practical feasibility for large masses application. Additionally, these are also ideal for vaccination of animals and birds living in the wild areas thereby preventing many zoonoses. However, at this moment there are many practical challenges like degradation of vaccine antigen by enzymes of upper digestive tract, dosage regime, oral tolerance and the issues concerned to the use of genetically modified plant. In the near future the biomedical applications of these vaccines could become a common alternative to conventional vaccines, for which there is a great need to strengthen research and development activities in this promising area for protecting health of animals as well as of humans.