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World's first new plant-based crown vaccine approved in Canada
2023-01-09
Canada has become the first country in the world to authorise the use of a plant-based New Crown vaccine, ABC reports.
On 24 February local time, Canadian regulators said they would allow two doses of Medicago's New Crown vaccine to be administered to adults between the ages of 18 and 64, but said there was still too little data related to people aged 65 and older.
The decision was based on a study of 24,000 adults. The two doses of Medicago vaccine combined with GlaxoSmithKline's adjuvant in this randomised phase III clinical study of more than 24,000 adult volunteers in six countries, including the UK and the US, had an overall efficacy of 71.6 per cent against all the new crown variant strains in people who had never been infected with the new crown virus before, and a 75 per cent rate of protection from delta-induced severe illness. The exception was the omicron variant strain, for which no data were available because omicron had not been identified during the study period.
No serious adverse events were observed during the trial, and side effects were generally mild to moderate and transient, the researchers said. The vaccine needs to be stored at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius, with two doses administered 21 days apart.
As previously reported, Medicago utilises virus-like particles from a tobacco plant whose proteins have a shell similar to those of neocoronaviruses but lack the virus' genome, making it completely harmless. It mimics the external structure of the new coronaviruses, making them easily recognised by the immune system.
In addition to this, Medicago is developing plant-based vaccines for a wide range of other diseases, and the company believes that a plant-based vaccine for neocollins may help to stimulate interest in this new approach to medical manufacturing.
