- Genetically modified plants are to be used to grow vaccines
against rabies and Aids, scientists have announced.
-
- Europe's first field trial, announced yesterday, is likely
to be carried out in South Africa because of fears over crop vandalism
in Britain.
-
- The GM crop could dramatically reduce the cost of producing
vaccines - scientists estimate they can be made at between a tenth and
a hundredth of the price of conventional immunisations.
-
- Dubbed "pharming" by its opponents, this is
the latest step in technology which allows medicines to be grown in plants.
Although this project is concerned with injectable vaccines, other trials
under consideration involve extending the research to oral vaccines which
might be grown in edible raw food such as bananas.
-
- Concerns about direct action by environmentalists opposed
to GM crops has led scientists behind the project to collaborate with a
South African research institute which has offered to grow the first crop
there.
-
- The EU has awarded ?12m (£8.6m) to a pan-European
consortium of scientists who aim to develop the technology for growing
GM plants that can be turned into vaccines against a range of common diseases
in the developing world.
-
- Professor Julian Ma of St George's Hospital Medical School
in London, the scientific co-ordinator of the project, said that it will
take about two years to develop the technique before the first crop is
scheduled to be grown in 2006.
-
- Clinical trials of the first vaccine derived from GM
plants are planned to take place in 2009.
-
- "Plants are inexpensive to grow and if we were to
engineer them to contain a gene for a pharmaceutical product they could
produce large quantities of drugs or vaccine at low cost," Professor
Ma said.
-
- "The current methods used to generate these types
of treatments are labour intensive, expensive and often only produce relatively
small amounts of pharmaceuticals," he said.
-
- It is likely the first pharmaceuticals crop will be GM
maize or GM tobacco that will be engineered with a set of genes for making
prototype vaccines against either HIV or rabies. By purifying the proteins
from the harvested crop scientists hope to mass-produce vaccines at a fraction
of the current cost.
-
- South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research is participating in the research and is particularly interested
in potential vaccines against HIV, the Aids virus.
-
- The Friends of the Earth GM campaigner Clare Oxborrow
said: "Growing medicines in plants has serious implications for human
health and the environment. We recognise the need for affordable medicines
to be made available to people with life-threatening illnesses but this
research could have widespread negative impacts."
-
- Professor Ma said that 3.3 million people a year die
from preventable diseases such as tuberculosis and diphtheria, yet there
is not the industrial capacity or funds to produce enough vaccines for
everyone. "The cost of doing nothing is measured in millions of people
who will die from preventable diseases," he said.
-
-
- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
-
-
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=540456
|
