Virus Vectors for Production of Pharmaceuticals in Plants

Over the past two decades, plants have been developed as inexpensive, efficacious and safe production platforms for vaccines and other biopharmaceuticals. One of the up and coming ways to generate vaccines quickly and in large amounts in plants is through the use of deconstructed plant virus expression vectors. This review discusses several of the state-of-the-art plant virus expression systems that have been engineered for vaccine production. Recent advances in tobamovirus, cucumovirus, geminivirus, and several other virus expression vector systems are described in this review, and examples of vaccines generated from each are described.