Banana vaccine

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BANANA VACCINES

Bananas have potential to become the world's first edible vaccine due to Agrobacterium. An edible vaccine doesn't need sterile syringes, costly refrigeration, or multiple injections. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 2 million children die worldwide each year from diarrhea that can be prevented easily with vaccines.

From Wegmans BananasThus, researchers lead by Dr. Charles Arntzen are looking into making the food vaccines to prevent diarrhea caused by Escherichia coli and Vibrio cholara bacteria. First, the gene for an immune system-stimulating disease protein would have to be spliced into the bacterium. The bacterium is then allowed to contaminate banana cells, inserting the Ti plasmid (containing the spliced gene) into their chromosomes. The next step is to grow the cells until they are mature fruit-bearing plants. The fruits, when eaten, would transfer the immunity to a particular disease into the consumer's body. This would be a relatively inexpensive and feasible method to distribute certain vaccines to people, especially in developing countries.

This has already been shown to work using potatoes and a modified E. coli protein that is known to cause severe diarrhea. When mice ate the raw engineered potatoes, they developed the antibodies to the E. coli toxin. Clinical tests on humans eating genetically engineered potatoes also showed that they started producing antibodies against Norwalk virus, which causes acute bouts of diarrhea (Redig 2003). For now, all clinical trials involve genetically modified potatoes or tomatoes, both of which can easily be freeze-dried, transported, and reconstituted. These can be more easily dosage regulated and quality controlled, unlike a banana tree growing in the middle of a village, for example. But the ideal of fresh banana vaccines is still being developed and perfected.