The Texas Plant-Expressed Vaccine Consortium has initiated Project GreenVax, a new biotherapeutic manufacturing initiative designed to show proof of concept for a landmark new technology that could dramatically increase the nation's capability to produce vaccines for infectious diseases, including influenza. The new vaccine production method uses tobacco plants rather than current egg-based vaccine technology, holding the promise of shortening vaccine production to a fraction of the current time and allowing rapid response to newly emerging viruses not possible with current technology. The majority of funding for the project is being provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

 

Texas A&M University and G-Con, a Texas-based company that specializes in new biomanufacturing technologies, make up the consortium, which designed Project GreenVax for a projected final scale capacity of 100 million doses per month. The flexibility of the plant-based system, combined with its low cost and ability to scale, may provide vaccine protection not only to citizens of the United States, but to many parts of the world that cannot currently afford vaccines.

 

The GreenVax Project will be constructed and managed by G-Con, which will integrate its proprietary modular, mobile, clean room pods where vaccine production will take place. These pods, as well as the flexible processes and facility design that led to the GreenVax project, were designed and developed for the National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing – a State of Texas core biological pharmaceutical manufacturing, research and education facility now in construction on the Texas A&M University campus, under the management of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station and supported by the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

 

“Project GreenVax and the National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing are game-changers. They have the potential to transform not just vaccine production, but the entire biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry," says Brett Giroir, vice chancellor for research for the A&M System and executive director of the Institute for Innovative Therapeutics, the newly established institute representing the partnership between the system's multiple state-of-the-art research facilities.

 

Although the initial goal is to produce influenza vaccines, G-Con says that plant-based production is highly adaptable to other infectious diseases and even cancer.