Swine fluDARPA wants "plant-based production system" to help combat flu

Published 13 July 2009

DARPA says that “Recent advances funded by DARPA and others have demonstrated the viability of plant-based protein expression technologies for the production and purification of cGMP-compliant medical countermeasures…”

DARPA is pushing the envelope again, this time with what the agency calls “plant-based production system” for harvesting valuable products beneficial to humanity. Lewis Page opines that DARPA appears to be motivated by the ongoing swine flu outbreak, as this quote from DARPA shows:

The 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic has highlighted the national need for larger scale vaccine manufacturing capabilities … Recent advances funded by DARPA and others have demonstrated the viability of plant-based protein expression technologies for the production and purification of cGMP-compliant medical countermeasures …

Requested are approaches that demonstrate a proof-of-concept facility capable of growing adequate plant biomass for the production of protein … Emphasis should be placed on infrastructure requirements and design, as well as equipment needed for the growth, processing, purification and validation of products …

Page writes that he hopes this bold venture will not end as a similar venture does in John Wyndham’s dystopian classic The Day of the Triffids. You may recall that, in the book, eponymous shuffling vegetable assassins roam the earth, theorized to have arisen as “the outcome of a series of ingenious biological meddling — and very likely accidental, at that,” most probably by secret government labs in Russia. In the book, large-scale cultivation and processing of Triffids began because “the extracts they give were very valuable in the circumstances.”