*Plant-based Vaccines: The Future of Preventive Healthcare? DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.97861*

**Table 6.**

*Plant-based vaccines developed for pandemic and epidemic diseases.*


#### **Table 7.**

*Plant-based vaccines producing companies and commercial products.*

been infected with COVID-19 worldwide [97]. In order to control the pandemic, the whole world work hard to develop new strategies to be applied in the field of health, to deliver vital medical supplies to those in need, to develop and apply safe and effective vaccines. Especially, the development of vaccines and drugs for this new pathogenic Coronavirus, which emerged suddenly and mutated at certain times, became an inevitable target. Until now, the number of vaccines in preclinical development are 182 and the number of vaccines in clinical development is 74, worldwide [8]. Plant-based vaccines have also proven that they can play an active role in fighting against COVID-19 with their promising results in preclinical and clinical stages. Along with the initiative of commercial companies using plant biotechnology, transient expression of the SARS-CoV-2 antigen in plants was achieved, and a plant-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate was produced with a high-scale production technology [81]. The COVID-19 vaccine developed by Medicago company using a plant-based platform started Phase II clinical trials. In this approach, virus-like particles (SARS-CoV-2 spike protein self-assambles into VLPs) could be produced by transient expression in *Nicotiana benthamiana* plants within just 20 days after the acquisition of SARS-CoV-2 [81]. For Phase I, vaccine administration in healthy adults was performed as two intramuscular doses and at 3 different dose levels (S protein content 3.75, 7.5 or 15 μg), either alone or with adjuvant (AS03 or CpG1018). After the second dose administration, the adjuvanted CoVLP was able to induce humoral and cellular responses for all dose levels. Another company,

#### *Plant-based Vaccines: The Future of Preventive Healthcare? DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.97861*

BAT's US Bio-tech arm, Kentucky BioProcessing (KBP), announced that the COVID-19 vaccine candidate will be evaluated in the Phase I trial after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepts the Investigational New Drug application. This candidate vaccine was developed using plant-based technology and it was stated that the active ingredient of the vaccine could be rapidly produced in a short period of 6 weeks according to conventional methods. In still another initiative, iBio, Inc. company announced that it was working on the subunit IBIO-201 candidate vaccine against SARS-CoV 2 immediately after the pandemic was declared. The candidate vaccine was produced by *Agrobacterium*-mediated infiltration in leaves of *Nicotiana benthamiana* plants and the target protein was purified and formulated for the final product. The candidate vaccine has been reported to induce the production of anti-spike neutralizing antibodies in immunized mice. Due to the new mutations of SARS-CoV-2, it has become important to produce subunits or virus-like particles as vaccine candidates at low cost-per-dose and higher production scale.
