The vaccines are typically produced in bacterial or eukaryotic systems and have proven to be very effective. However, they have high production costs.
Herbal vaccines, suggest a pair of researchers from the Université Laval, Quebec, would be much cheaper to produce and could have other benefits as well .
Advantages of vegetable vaccine
Instead of bioreactors, plant-based vaccines could be grown in fields as crops. Another benefit comes from the very nature of plants: they cannot become infected with the types of human pathogens that lead to the need for vaccines.
In addition, the aforementioned research has shown that herbal vaccines tend to produce a stronger immune response than those prepared in other ways . And herbal vaccines have higher yields than other methods. And finally, in some cases, herbal vaccines could be administered directly as a food product, without the need to extract or process them.
The authors note that the manufacture of herbal vaccines is not unheard of; there is one that is currently being produced and used to treat Gaucher disease. Furthermore, just before the current COVID-19 pandemic, a herbal vaccine for influenza made its way through Phase III clinical trials with promising results. And right now, a team is working on a herbal vaccine for COVID-19 .
They thus suggest that government regulatory bodies around the world should become more familiar with the benefits of herbal vaccines, so that guidelines can be drawn up to promote this approach if herbal vaccines are to become a new thing. standard.