Edible Hepatitis B Vaccine May Be On The Horizon, Could Eradicate Virus.

2001 OCT 24 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Sonia Nichols, senior medical writer - In the not so distant future, hepatitis B vaccinations could be dispensed at the farmer's market instead of the doctor's office.

Researchers used uncooked and unprocessed potatoes expressing recombinant hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) to boost immune response in mice. Edible vaccines might hold the key for global vaccine distribution and the eradication of hepatitis B virus (HBV), the vaccine's developers have proposed.

Investigators at New York's Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, in conjunction with colleagues at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, also of New York, and Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, developed the oral vaccine. They compared its efficacy in mice with another oral HBsAg vaccine derived from yeast, using an oral adjuvant composed of cholera toxin to boost vaccine efficacy.

"Transgenic plant material containing hepatitis B surface antigen was the superior means of both inducing a primary immune response and priming the mice to respond to a subsequent parenteral injection of HBsAg," said Qingxian Kong and colleagues of Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

The scientists say HBsAg becomes encapsulated in plant cells, affording protection for the antigen during the trip through the digestive tract until the cells can reach an immune effector site and be degraded.

After study mice ate the HBsAg-transgenic potatoes, they developed ...