ONE of the first human trials of an edible vaccine produced promising results. But the vaccine, a potato genetically engineered to produce a hepatitis B protein, has been abandoned because of fears that “pharm” crops could be mixed up with normal produce.
Details of the potato’s trial have only just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0409899102). When 42 volunteers ate two or three doses of the raw potato, concentrations of hepatitis B antibodies in their blood increased up to 60-fold.
The idea of edible vaccines like this was to enable developing countries to…
