COVID-19 Vaccine Created Using Tobacco Plants to Move Forward With Human Testing.
British American Tobacco (BAT) has won approval in the United States to begin testing its COVID-19 vaccine on adult volunteers.
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Enrollment for human trials is expected to start shortly, with results hopefully by mid-2021.
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BAT is a multinational tobacco company responsible for brands such as Dunhill, Lucky Strike and Pall Mall.
Its vaccine is reportedly unique because it utilizes tobacco plants for reproduction of its potential antigen.
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BAT claims that its vaccine can be produced in just six weeks by turning tobacco plants into “bio-manufacturing factories.”.
That is much faster than traditional methods, which generally take months to produce the same results.
It is our unique plant-based vaccine technology, which acts as a fast, efficient host for the production of antigens for a variety of diseases, that has enabled us to make this progress, BAT’s Director of Scientific Research Dr. David O’Reilly, via ‘The Guardian’.
In addition, BAT says its vaccine is stable at room temperature, unlike the Pfizer vaccine which must be kept at minus 70 degrees Celsius