The development of new tobacco varieties to be used for the production of pharmaceuticals and vaccines is the focus of an international collaboration funded by the EC through its Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.
Research from Queensland University of Technology (QUT), one of 18 partners in the four-year project, will underpin the project, which intends to create plant breeding techniques that could be used to create high-value, non-smoking tobacco varieties to become factories producing molecules and proteins for drugs and vaccines.
"This project looks to provide tobacco plants which are efficient biofactories and which can be farmed, providing an alternative to farming of traditional tobacco," Cara Mortimer, research fellow at QUT, explained. Traditional tobacco is in decline around the world, and this presents social problems in many rural areas where communities and farmers' livelihoods have been built around the crops."
Mortimer said QUT was invited to participate in the project largely because of the work of molecular genetics professor Peter Waterhouse and his team in sequencing the genome of Nicotiana benthamiana. The team has sequenced about 85% of those genes and shared the information through an open source website. A further 11% of the genes have been partially sequenced, while the remaining 4% are yet to be identified.
N. benthamiana is a known biofactory for recombinant proteins. It was used to produce ZMapp, the antibody cocktail administered during the 2015 Ebola outbreak, and is currently being tested for production of an array of pharmaceutical proteins, from viral vaccines to therapeutic treatments for breast cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, autoimmune diseases, and fungal infections.