Immunisation without needles
A fascinating report in today's BMJ on deveopment of oral vaccines from plants is well worth reading. Professor Arntzen and his team at Arizona State University are getting closer with an oral vaccine against Norwalk virus grown in a type of wild tobacco. "Exhaustive laboratory experiments show that this vaccine induces a powerful immune response in mice," he says. "Preliminary trials in humans should be underway within a year." A team of scientists from Japan reported preliminary success with rice engineered to carry a vaccine against subunit B of the cholera toxin.4 Mice fed the rice produced neutralising antibodies in their gut mucosa that seemed to protect them from an oral challenge with the cholera toxin
[BMJ 2007;335:180-182 (28 July)].