Cannabis company using plants to search for COVID-19 vaccine
A Saskatoon-based company best known for its research on medical cannabis is collaborating with leading vaccine researchers to see if plant cells can produce a key ingredient for a COVID-19 vaccine.
ZYUS Life Sciences Inc., which specializes in plant-based therapeutics like cannabinoids, is working with the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization-international Vaccine Centre (Vido-intervac) to see if proteins produced by plants can be made into a working COVID -19 vaccine.
CEO Brent Zettl said the company has years of experience “teaching” plants how to manufacture specific proteins and then “purifying” samples to get exactly the compound they need.
“When the pandemic was first breaking, we had this platform and we were producing other compounds,” Zettl said. “And so I turned to the scientists in our team and asked if the protein VIDO -Intervac were targeting could be produced by us, and they said, ‘Yeah, I think we can do this for sure.’”
Vido-intervac has been working on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus since January, when it seemed a faraway threat. The organization was the first laboratory in Canada to successfully isolate SARS-COV-2 and has a federally-approved facility to test possible vaccines.
It has received nearly $50 million in federal and provincial funding to fast-track its research and ramp up manufacturing capacity for a vaccine to battle the virus.
To make a vaccine, you need an antigen, something that mimics the virus and trains our immune systems to make antibodies that can fend off the real thing.
“That’s what your body recognizes as foreign, so if ever the real pathogen enters, you’re prepared to fight it,” VIDO -Intervac associate director of business development Dr. Paul Hodgson said.
Vido-intervac and most other researchers develop those antigens in animal cells.
Zettl’s company realized the same process may be possible with plants.
Using its existing platform, the company is now trying to “teach” plants, specifically a type of tobacco, to see if it can generate a usable antigen, with the goal of extracting enough protein to get a purified sample to Vido-intervac before fall. It’s one of several projects the organization is part of in its efforts to explore different ways of making a vaccine.
The project is not a magic “slam dunk,” Zetti said, noting there’s rarely such a thing in science. But he and Hodgson believe it will help scientists learn more about the applicability of plant cells in producing such antigens. That could be especially important when the world needs to produce billions of COVID-19 vaccines.
Even if the project isn’t useful in the immediate future, Zettl said it could also be a vehicle for future vaccine development the next time a pandemic strikes.
“In a pandemic it pays to have more than one horse in the race,” Zettl said.