At the beginning of this school year, millions of children in the United States had to undergo the painful jab of reality which accompanies the U.S. health requirements for vaccination against Hepatitis B. In the very near future that same vaccination might be given by eating bite-sized pieces of raw potato containing an edible vaccine. Ask any child which vaccination they would prefer?

Development of vaccines which are delivered through plants has been the focus of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI) of Ithaca, New York. The vaccine for Hepatitis B has been placed into a potato and that potato is now scheduled to be grown as a pharmaceutical crop in Wisconsin by American Ag-Tec International, Ltd., a Delavan, Wisconsin based agricultural technology company.

Production and manufacturing agreements have been reached between Ag-Tec, and Axis Genetics of Cambridge, England, a plant pharmaceutical company who now holds an exclusive License for this medical technology. The agreement allows Ag-Tec to proceed in Wisconsin with the multiplication of the first pharmaceutical potato crop in the history of the world.

American Ag-Tec International, Ltd. was selected for its expertise in pioneering and patenting a technique for the rapid multiplication of disease-free potato minitubers which is the first step of seed potato development. The process, called Quantum Tubers™, has the capacity to eliminate as many as five years from the field multiplication which current seed production systems use worldwide. Additionally, the Quantum Tubers™ technology is controlled biomanufacturing which lends itself to the production protocols demanded by Axis Genetics for complying with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration clinical approval process. The decision was a natural because the production controls necessary for development of the first pharmaceutical potato crop were already in place with Quantum Tubers™ via Ag-Tec.

" This advancement will revolutionize vaccination programs. With its roots in agriculture, it will raise the status of the lowly potato by a quantum leap," said Robert G. Britt, President of American Ag-Tec International, Ltd.

American Ag-Tec International, Ltd., based in Delavan, Wisconsin is an international agricultural technology development company working in seed and food production worldwide. The recent development of the Quantum Tubers™ technology for mass output of pathogen-free seed potato is the only technology of its kind with origins in production agriculture, as well as in space through the NASA research program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Visit the Ag-Tec website at http://www.ag-tec.com .

Axis Genetics is a private company based in Cambridge, England, developing vaccines from plants. The company is working with Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, Ithaca, New York, to develop Edible Plant Vaccines for the prevention of Hepatitis B, enterotoxigenic E. coli travelers’ diarrhoea, and Norwalk virus infections. Using its proprietary chimaeric virus particle technology EPICOAT®, Axis is also developing vaccines for cancer, Pseudomonas aerruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus infections. Visit the Axis Genetics website at http://www.axisgenetics.co.uk .

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