Medicago: how is the COVID-19 vaccine of plant origin that will be tested in the country

In the midst of a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that does not give a truce in Argentina and in a context of a shortage of vaccines, the National Administration of Drugs, Food and Medical Technology (Anmat) has approved the phase III trial of a formulation from the Canadian laboratory Medicago.

Quebec biopharmaceutical company and British giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced yesterday Tuesday, intermediate positive results for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

The companies expressed hope that its formulation could help in the global fight against the pandemic. “We are delighted to see that the results suggest a very strong immune response,” said Thomas Breuer, medical director of GSK Vaccines, in a joint release with Medicago.

“Now We look forward to the results of the ongoing Phase III trial of this candidate vaccine as the next step in our contribution to the global response to the pandemic.“, He added.

Nathalie Landry is Medicago’s executive vice president of scientific and medical affairs, noting that after two doses, the candidate vaccine “induced potent neutralizing antibodies and cellular immune responses in all subjects, regardless of age.”

And after noting that “these results provide confidence as the clinical trial continues to move forward,” he said: “We hope to add another tool in the global fight against COVID-19, especially when cross-protection emerges as an important consideration in vaccination efforts around the world ”.

The phase III trial was launched on Sunday March 16 with participants from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil. Argentina will add around five thousand volunteers to obtain data on the efficacy and safety of the product.

Six Argentinian medical centers that will recruit volunteers, including the Central Military Hospital (the same that carried out the main global phase III trial of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine) and Mautalen. Volunteers must be between the ages of 18 and 59, have not had coronavirus, have not received another vaccine or be part of another clinical trial, and may or may not have other underlying illnesses or comorbidities.

Half will receive the doses and the other half will receive the placebo (then, if approved, all will receive their vaccination). Like most licensed emergency vaccines, it requires two applications three weeks apart.

Innovative technology and easy maintenance

The new vaccine candidate against COVID-19 is of plant origin, in combination with the pandemic adjuvant from GSK.

What is innovative is that has a different technology than that used by the rest of the vaccines, since it uses living plants as bioreactors to reproduce a non-infectious particle that mimics the virus it seeks to neutralize. It is known as virus-like particles (VLPs).

The Canadian pharmaceutical company is a pioneer in herbal therapies and, in this case, “uses plants from Nicotine benthamiana, which is the most widely used experimental host in plant virology, mainly due to the large number of viruses who can successfully infect it. “. “Their weakened immune system, the result of natural genetic changes over millennia, means that genetic material can be successfully harbored by the plant and not rejected,” they explained from the lab on their website.

Vaccines can be stored in refrigerators, which could be essential for developing countries that do not have the capacity to store doses that must be kept at ultra-cold temperatures.

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