“Process to Cultivate Vaccines in Fruit Will Help Third World Kids”

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Kathleen Hefferon, a researcher with the Cornell Research Foundation, has been investigating the possibility of growing plants that include vaccines, a system that could eventually become a cheap and easy way to distribute vaccines in developing nations that lack effective medical infrastructures. Hefferon’s biggest initial problem had been in getting enough of a vaccine inside a piece of fruit to stimulate an immune response in the body. She discovered a fruit virus called Gemini that while harmless to humans, can be used to help replicate vaccine proteins inside the fruit to numbers high enough to be effective. She notes that the researchers are seeking development funding, but that pharmaceutical companies have not been interested in the project and opponents to transgenic food crops have hampered the efforts.

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