Medicinal Plants as Sources for Drugs and Vaccines

Abstract

In general, vaccines are important biological factors that stimulate human immunity to resist various diseases or their pathogens that invade him. The vaccine includes protein material of the pathogen itself, which is either killed or weakened form, or is made from corresponding artificial protein subunits to help human’s immune system for recognizing antigens. However, it has been observed that there are some side effects appeared from using of traditional vaccines, which made trending toward finding alternative solutions is an important goal. In recent years, with the progress in medicinal sciences, genetics and plant biotechnology, the concept of edible vaccines has emerged by biotechnologists in an attempt to use edible plants in the production of alternative vaccines for commercial vaccines that are useful in treating diseases that affect humans without needing for injection or refrigerated storage, which is done through genetically engineering plants to carry antigens through several methods, like bacterial vectors, shot gun or microinjection through plant tissue culture techniques to produce vaccine-bearing plants like banana, maize, potato, rice, tobacco, tomato, legumes and others which makes these plants have two tasks, their suitability for food and to stimulate the body’s immune response against many pathogens at once.