Abstract
Defining the molecular basis of the infectious diseases by the highly accumulated data on genetics and molecular biology facilitated developing new prophylactic and therapeutic vaccination strategies against human and animal diseases. On the other hand, vaccine development process still has many technical and economical limitations. Therefore, low-income countries, which do not have powerful healthcare infrastructure, neither produce their own vaccines nor benefit enough from the current vaccination programs. In this aspect, plants are promising to be used as biofactories for producing edible vaccines and several therapeutics due to their easy manipulations and also low-cost manufacturing properties. In this chapter, the advantages, limitations of the edible vaccines, the studies related to plant-derived edible vaccines and therapeutics up to date are summarized.
Keywords: Plant derived edible vaccines, therapeutics, recombinant proteins.