Overview of plant-made vaccine antigens against malaria

CLEMENTE, MARINA; CORIGLIANO, MARIANA G

JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICINE AND BIOTECHNOLOGY

HINDAWI PUBLISHING CORPORATION

Lugar: New York; Año: 2012 p. 1 - 8

1110-7243

Malaria is a major global health problem caused by parasites of the genus Plasmodium. This disease is responsible for the death of over one million people annually. Plant-based expression systems represent an attractive production platform due to their reduced manufacturing costs and high scalability. The development of vaccines against malaria based on plant-made antigens is focused on surface antigens of Plasmodium ssp. Codon optimization combined with magnICON® expression system has allowed a 100-fold increase in the malaria antigen expression compared to the transgenic tobacco system. On the other hand, dual cholera-malaria vaccine antigens in lettuce and tobacco chloroplasts express 30-fold more protein than other malaria antigens expressed in nuclear transgenic lines. Besides, it has been demonstrated that oral immunization with plant-made malaria antigens can induce effective immunity against the parasite. However, in some cases, immunization with plant-made antigens elicits a lower immune response than that with Escherichia coli-made antigens. The presence of monomeric forms in some plant-made antigens would explain the inability of these proteins to induce effective protection. On the other hand, plant-made non-glycosylated malaria antigens generate higher anti-malaria antibodies titers, supporting the idea that the chloroplast would be the best compartment to express this group of proteins. In summary, several works have demonstrated the availability of diverse plant-based systems to produce antigens against malaria and have explored different means of delivery, in particular, oral immunization. However, a thorough research is needed to understand the immune response elicited by orally delivered plant made malaria antigens.