Biology Now, 2e

Tobacco’s New Leaf ■ 175

Tobacco Egg

Speed from outbreak to

vaccine production:

1 month 6 months

Cost to produce 50 million

flu vaccines:

$36 million $400 million

Allergy risks: Minimal Individuals with egg

allergies cannot receive

the vaccine

Availability: Not yet approved by the

Food and Drug Adminis-

tration

Approved and currently

the most widely used

technology to produce flu

vaccines

Figure 10.3

To b a c c o o r e g g?

Using tobacco plants to produce proteins for

influenza vaccines has several advantages over

the traditional approach using chicken eggs.

Q1: Which is the faster way to produce

vaccines: biopharming with plants or

creating vaccines in eggs? Why is this

important?

Q2: How much cheaper is biopharming with

plants than creating vaccines in eggs? Why

is this important?

Q3: Why must tobacco-derived vaccines,

or any new medications for that matter, be

approved by the FDA?

extract the virus, remove its genetic material,

and prepare a vaccine from the leftover viral

proteins. It’s a long, cumbersome process.

Unlike chicken eggs, however, plants can

be grown in vast quantities, and they grow

rapidly—often in just days or weeks. “The big

advantage of plant systems is that they can

produce massive amounts of proteins very inex-

pensively,” says James Roth, director of the

Center for Food Security and Public Health at

Iowa State University, who studies biopharm-

ing in plants and animals (and is not associated

with Medicago). In the event of a pandemic flu

outbreak, Medicago could produce vaccines 6

times faster and 12 times cheaper than tradi-

tional egg manufacturing could, the company

claims (Figure 10.3).

In April 2012, Medicago put its tobacco plants

to the test, running the North Carolina manu-

facturing facility at full tilt for 30 days. The U.S.

Department of Defense had given the company

millions of dollars to test whether it could quickly

produce enough pandemic flu vaccine from the

tobacco to stem an outbreak. The pressure is

on, said Wanner, standing inside the facility. He

looked out over his crop. “We’ll see what happens.”

Fighting the Flu

with Tobacco

In 1997, Louis-Philippe Vézina, then a research

scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

and an associate professor at Université Laval in

Quebec City, Canada, decided to start a company.

A plant biotechnologist, Vézina wanted to explore

the possibility of manufacturing proteins in

alfalfa plants, and thus he called his company

Medicago, after the genus to which alfalfa

belongs. Later, as the company grew, Vézina and

his team discovered that tobacco produces higher

yields of proteins in a shorter time frame than

alfalfa does, so the company switched plants.

Michael Wanner is chief financial officer and

U.S. site manager for Medicago, an innovative

biotechnology company that develops vaccines

in the leaves of tobacco plants.

MICHAEL WANNER