Kerry's wife may battle against AIDS one day

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Transgenic Tomatoes Fight AIDS

Plants engineered to produce edible HIV vaccine

Ketchup could soon fight AIDS thanks to tomatoes engineered by Russian scientists to produce a vaccine against the disease.

Researchers from Russia's Vector State Scientific Center for Virology and Biotechnology and Institute for Biological Chemistry and Fundamental Medicine have reported genetically modifying tomatoes to prime the immune system against HIV, the virus behind AIDS.


Immune priming

Since HIV was reported to cause AIDS in 1984, researchers have learned much about how a vaccine against it might work.

The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, for example, says that it can take an average of 10 years for someone infected with HIV to develop AIDS, meaning that the immune system can control the virus temporarily and that these defenses could be boosted by a vaccine.

The group, headquartered in New York City, New York, also says that some female sex workers have been found to have immunity to HIV, and that immune cells that can be stimulated by a vaccine are thought to be responsible.

Researchers think that by presenting the body with HIV antigens—proteins that will prepare it to attack the virus—they can create an effective AIDS vaccine.


Food as medicine

Edible vaccines are thought to have many advantages, including the fact that they can be made cheaply and distributed without special storage and transportation needs.

According to the Russian researchers, transgenic plants have already been cultivated that carry HIV antigens, but they are not edible and can lose some of their therapeutic potential during processing. Additionally, tomatoes can be grown widely, while some other vaccine-engineered crops such as bananas cannot.

The thinking is that antigens from the transgenic tomatoes would activate an immune response in the gut, causing people to produce antibodies against the protein.


Homegrown treatments

To create their tomatoes, the Russian researchers used a vector to introduce genes encoding HIV virus proteins. They injected the vector into germinating tomato plants and grew the plants in a hothouse until they produced fruit.

The researchers then tested the plants and found that the HIV antigen was present in both the leaves and the fruit itself.

They also tested to see if the genetic modification was passed to subsequent generations and found that seeds from the original plants also produced transgenic plants, which means that they could be widely dispersed to let people grow their own vaccines.