Tobacco Vaccine

(Washington, D.C.) Plant researchers at Arizona State University yesterday announced that tobacco plants are being used to develop a cheap and easy-to-use vaccine to fight a stomach virus called norovirus.

They found a way to make tobacco produce a protein that can be used to make a nasal vaccine against norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, especially on cruise ships, in restaurants, schools and on military bases.

"Under appropriate medical care it is not life-threatening. It is just very, very inconvenient," Charles Arntzen, a plant biologist at Arizona State University, told a news conference at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. [...]

Arntzen and colleagues used a genetically engineered plant virus called the tobacco mosaic virus to start their vaccine.

"We force it to make the protein which is the vaccine against norovirus," Arntzen told the news conference. "We call them nanoparticle vaccines because the protein we produce in our tobacco plant self-assembles into a little round ball."

The immune system recognizes this ball, called a virus-like particle or a capsid, as if it were a virus and attacks it, Arntzen said. "It is empty. It cannot cause disease," he said.

Heh.