Plant-made veterinary vaccines for newcastle disease virus

Abstract

Newcastle disease is a word-wide, highly problematic, infectious, acute respiratory disease of domesticated and wild avian species. Newcastle disease virus proved an ideal target for a proof-of-concept study investigating the ability of a plant-made vaccines to successfully navigate the US veterinary regulatory system because it has: a single dominant viral surface antigen that is protective; a well-defined disease challenge model; readily available positive controls; and standardized diagnostic assays (Mihaliak et al. in Development of plant cell produced vaccines for animal health applicaions. United States Animal Health Association, Greensboro, 2004). However despite the Proof-of Concept study proving successful and an additional study proving an orally delivered, plant-made NDV vaccine could protect against challenge (Guerrero-Andrade et al. in Transgenic Res, 15(4): 455-463, 2006) a plant-made NDV vaccine has not been marketed. This is most likely due to the competition faced from numerous NDV vaccines already on the market that have proven successful for many years. Now that plant-made vaccines (for animal and human use) have successfully made it through regulatory systems, the target of future, commercial, plant-made vaccine investigations should either target a niche disease or a disease that has little or weaker competition already on the market.