They are looking for volunteers to test the first vaccine “made” in a factory in the country

New coronavirus vaccine to start test yourself on volunteers in Argentina. The peculiarity of this development, by the Canadian pharmaceutical company Medicago, is that it uses a “plant” as the antigen factory, a unprecedented mechanism in vaccines approved to date.

The protocol has already been authorized by the National Administration of Drugs and Medical Technology (ANMAT) and the announcement was made by Mautalen Salud, one of the medical centers that will participate in the clinical study in Argentina, and that is already recruiting volunteers through their website.

As detailed at Bugle Daniel Chirino, the researcher in charge of the trial at this center in Argentina, will participate 5,000 volunteers, of which between 300 and 500 will be recruited in this research institute located in Barrio Norte, specializing in clinical research and which for 25 years conducted clinical trials for drugs from different therapeutic areas.

The search for volunteers must have between 18 and 59 years old and accept both healthy people and those who have comorbidities this can be a risk factor for the coronavirus. When filling out the form, for example, it is consulted whether the patient is undergoing cancer treatment, among other things.

The vaccine is two doses, which are applied with an interval of 21 days. It was developed by the Canadian biopharmaceutical company and the laboratory GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) provides an adjuvant to enhance its effect.

In the phase III trial which is beginning, in addition to the Argentinian volunteers, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and European countries will also participate, up to approximately 30,000 people.

From tobacco to Covid

The technology used by the Medicago vaccine is innovative among the strategies to deal with SARS-CoV-2. The company operates a different platform than that used by most pharmaceutical companies and relies on the use of living plants as bioreactors to reproduce a non-infectious particle that mimics the target virus, but without using live viruses. It is known as virus or VLP-like particles (for the acronym in English of virus like particle).

First, a particle is synthesized which has an external structure similar to that of the virus and which consists of a lipid membrane and Spike protein, but without the genetic load.

And here is the most original: these particles multiply in the leaves of the Nicotiana benthamiana, a wild plant of the tobacco family. It is no coincidence: one of the founding companies of the Medicago laboratory is Phillip Morris tobacco company.

“These particles are introduced into the cells of the plant, which synthesizes and produces them. Plants act like mini vaccine factories. There are no live viruses or animal products, which generates less risk of adverse effects, ”explains Chirino, who notices that the production takes place in the cells of a natural plant,“ it is not. not transgenic ”.

Regarding the participation of GSK, one of the giants of the pharmaceutical industry, this laboratory contributes an adjuvant used in many vaccines “Which stimulates the immune response. This elicits a greater immune response with fewer doses of the vaccine, ”adds the researcher.

While VLP technology is new to the coronavirus – there are two other experimental vaccines that use it, but it is the most advanced – the Canadian laboratory has already used it in the production of influenza vaccines.

The CoVLP vaccine (that’s its name so far) is the sixth coronavirus immunization trial to be carried out in Argentina. The first was that of Pfizer and later the vaccines Sinopharm, Janssen, Cansino Biologics and more recently the German vaccines CureVac were tested in our country.