Can you produce a COVID-19 vaccine by growing grass? It works! It’s already been approved!

On February 24, 2022, biopharmaceutical companies Medicago and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced that the Canadian Ministry of Health approved their new coronavirus vaccine, trade name COVIFENZ®.

This vaccine is the world's first approved plant-derived human vaccine.

COVIFENZ® is produced through the model plant "Nicotiana benthamiana". The antigen is a virus-like particle composed of spike protein, which is used together with GSK's pandemic adjuvant.

The vaccine is administered via two intramuscular injections 21 days apart, with a single immunization dose of 3.75 micrograms.

The vaccine should be stored at 2 °C to 8 °C. COVIFENZ® antigen will be produced in Canada and North Carolina, USA.

This is a method that uses plant bioreactors as a vaccine production system. This method has the potential to produce a variety of vaccines, with high speed and high safety.

The technology of expressing foreign proteins in plants was established as early as 1986. After 35 years of hard work by scientists, the first plant-derived human vaccine product COVIFENZ® was finally approved this year.

The grass we planted this time is called Nicotiana benthamiana. Isn't the name particularly strange? This is a plant native to Australia. Like peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and cultivated tobacco, it belongs to the Solanaceae family and is an allotetraploid plant with 19 chromosomes. In the past decade, Nicotiana benthamiana has been widely used in plant-microbe interactions, identification of protein interactions and subcellular localization, metabolic regulation, vaccine production and synthetic biology. It is considered an important model plant besides Arabidopsis.

doi:10.1146/annurev-phyto-080417-050141 (2018).