Tagged: Plantibodies
Block That Sperm! (The Atlantic Magazine, March, 2015)
Antibodies from plants: By inserting human genes into plants, scientists have been able to create disease-fighting proteins called “plantibodies,” which work just like the antibodies that the human immune system makes to ward off infections. Harvesting such proteins from plants—many plantibody researchers work with tobacco—is far cheaper than growing them in human cell cultures.(The world got a preview of plantibodies at work with ZMapp, the plantibody-based experimental drug that has been used to treat a handful of Ebola patients.) Researchers headed up by a team at Boston University are working to create a combination of plantibodies that would combat sperm, herpes, and HIV. The plantibodies would trap sperm and germs in vaginal mucus, paralyzing them until they are cleared from the body. Only the herpes and HIV plantibodies have been tested so far, and only in animals; sperm plantibodies are at an earlier stage of development. But eventually, the researchers hope to load all three proteins into a vaginal ring that would provide monthlong protection.
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Plantibodies Could Pave the Road to Wellness (Newsweek, Dec. 15, 2014)
One day, women everywhere may dissolve a postage-stamp sized piece of translucent film in their vaginas. It might look like a Listerine strip. It might be coated with compounds capable of making sperm wriggle in place, keeping them from inseminating a woman’s egg. It might also halt the HIV and herpes viruses found in semen in their tracks. Oh, and those compounds might be grown in a lab inside tobacco plants.
This isn’t a playful exercise in techno-futurism. This is a description of a product, about to enter clinical research phases, that is part of an emerging group of drugs that are radically changing how we treat infectious disease.
In a dark room in the basement of the biomedical research building at Boston Medical Center, Jai Marathe leans over a laser scanning microscope, adjusting a plate that holds a disk of human tissue the size of a poker chip. The flap of flesh was made from human cervical cells by a company that sells them as vaginal models to researchers. Earlier, Marathe coated it in an antibody capable of attacking the sperm cells by making them stick together, preventing them from swimming. Then she coated the tissue in semen donated by a Boston University student. The dose of antibody had been grown inside a tobacco plant at a bioprocessing lab in Kentucky. The “plantibody,” as this and other antibodies grown in plants have been dubbed by the handful of companies that develop them, is the product of decades of sky-high hopes and experimentation.
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