Scientist Draw Plague Vaccine From Tobacco Plants

Source from:  science.monstersandcritics.com Jan 9, 2006, 23:15 GMT Washington 01/11/2006

Tobacco plants may yield a new vaccine against the plague, scientists said Monday, offering hope in fighting one of the world's oldest diseases and a potential biological weapon. Researchers at Arizona State University, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick and the Bio-Centre at Halle, Germany, published their findings on the vaccine's first trials on guinea pigs in a U.S. medical journal. Bubonic plague, the 'Black Death' of the Middle Ages, still flares up occasionally in many parts of the world. The researchers extracted two proteins from tobacco leaves that the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis uses to cause diseases and injected them into guinea pigs exposed to the plague bacterium. Three-quarters of the vaccinated animals developed immunity and survived the normally fatal form of plague, said the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Even those guinea pigs that died after being vaccinated lived longer than a group of unvaccinated animals, the study said. If found to be safe in humans, the system of extracting proteins from tobacco could produce large amounts of vaccine, the researchers said. Last month, scientists at the University of Central Florida successfully immunised mice against anthrax with a vaccine gained from tobacco. Enditem