Russian Researchers Develop Tomato Vaccine Against HIV and Hepatitis - NEWS - MOSNEWS.COM

soon people could be gaining the benefits of promising experiments of growing HIV vaccines in tomatoes. This offers the hope of cheap, sustainable vaccines for the poorest of countries

Rurik Salyaev at the Siberian Institute of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry in Irkutsk, Russia, and his colleagues used the soil bacterium
Agrobacterium tumefaciens to shuttle a synthetic combination of HIV and HBV DNA fragments into
tomato plants. These include fragments of genes for various HIV proteins and the gene for an HBV protein called HBV surface antigen.

The tomato plants then manufacture the proteins and, like the oral polio vaccine, when the tomatoes are eaten, these proteins prompt the body to create antibodies against the viruses