Ronald Levy of Stanford University Medical Center in California and his colleagues have carried out the first clinical trial of plant-produced therapeutic vaccines against non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The vaccines were grown in tobacco plants by infecting the plants with a tobacco mosaic virus containing DNA fragments cloned from each patient's cancer cells, thus matching each vaccine to its potential beneficiary.
Eleven of the 16 participants with the cancer had developed a cellular immune response 28 days after vaccination; six of these made antibodies specific to certain proteins found on the surface of their cancerous white blood cells.
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Immunology: Green vaccines. Nature 454, 555 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/454555c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/454555c