In planta produced virus-like particles as candidate vaccines

Plants are promising biotechnological tools for the production of pharmaceutical proteins and vaccines due to their advantages in terms of costs, feasibility and scalability of production. Among biopharmaceuticals, virus-like particles (VLPs) composed of single or multiple virus proteins with self-assembly capacity represent one of the most attractive systems of antigen production in plants. This is due to the potent immunogenic capacity and safety of VLPs which might be used as plant-made vaccines against various human and animal diseases. Furthermore, VLPs do not require long purification steps and the cold chain, which are limiting factors in the production of conventional vaccines. These characteristics allow VLPs to compete as ideal alternative candidate vaccines, either as simple products or as more complex platforms to carry heterologous immunogenic sequences on their surfaces. In this chapter, we report the progress on the production of VLPs of four well-defined human/animal viruses (Papillomaviruses, Hepatitis B virus, Human immunodeficiency virus 1 and Influenza A virus) in plants.