The Star E-dition

Lack of funding stymies vaccine research

MURPHY NGANGA murphy.nganga@inl.co.za

SCIENTISTS from the University of Cape Town, who spent two decades studying plant-made vaccines before shifting their focus to the Covid-19 pandemic, have reported a successful, near-full length Sarscov-2 vaccine spike in plants.

Emmanuel Margolin, a post-doctoral scientist at the Institute of Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine, said the production of proteins in plants with pharmaceutical value has been pursued for several decades following the realisation that a plant pathogen, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, could be engineered to introduce foreign DNA into plant cells.

With the vaccine rollout programme already in full swing, Margolin said the main obstacle to further development of these forms of vaccines was a lack of infrastructure for manufacturing on the continent. “There are currently no facilities capable of manufacturing on scale or under the necessary conditions to progress to human testing.

“While production costs and the cost to establish a facility are lower for plantbased manufacturing this still requires a considerable capital investment.

“Another major obstacle is the lack of funding support for further development. Although we had shown proof-of-concept that we could produce the vaccine in plants early on in the pandemic, we did not have adequate funding support to progress with further development.

“Unfortunately, this has resulted in this project being run in the background rather than as a dedicated project of its own. This has been further exacerbated by Covid-related

funding cuts to key initiatives,” said Margolin.

Vaccinologist at Vaccines for Africa, Dr Benjamin Kagina, said that although the plant-based vaccine could be seen as beneficial from a financial and safety point of view, a lot still needed to be done in order to stand head to head with the rise of the new technological method of how vaccines were manufactured.

“With scientists exploring different ways of making vaccines, plant-based vaccine development is purely born from the need to understand how the human immune system works. However, with the competing era of technology, I think that the development is still growing and a lot still needs to be taken into consideration in order to stand against what is already out there.”

Metro

en-za

2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thestar.pressreader.com/article/282484301909947

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