Firm appears to be out of business. AgriVax, Inc., a small biotechnology company founded to develop plants that make and deliver vaccines for agricultural animals. The firm's research involves inserting a foreign genes into plant cells, and then growing up the genetically transformed cells into plants. For the last decade, scientists have been able to add genes to plants, making so-called transgenic plants, to give them resistance to herbicides, viral infections or simply to change their taste. What is new here the kind of genes being added and what the new plants are designed to do. Transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) causes diarrhea in swine. Adding the gene for the TGEV antigen to potatoes. The viral antigen is the portion of the virus that triggers the body's immune response, and can be used to prime the immune system. Vaccines work on the assumption that the next time the body sees the antigen, it will be ready to kill the infecting virus, wiping it out before it has a chance to do any damage. When the AgriVax team fed the potatoes to pigs, they found the pigs produced antibodies against the virus. They then exposed the pigs to the virus, and found that the animals were protected against infection. AgriVax arranged with another company, ProdiGene, a spin-off from the seed giant Pioneer Hybrid, to develop transgenic corn carrying the TGEV vaccine. Corn, despite being more difficult to genetically engineer, is a better animal feed and can be stored as seed much longer than potatoe The parasite cryptosporidium is another target of AgriVax's research. The parasite, a coccidia, is transferred through feces and can contaminate drinking water and food. It causes intestinal disease in dairy cows and humans, and, like other parasites such as malaria, there is no vaccine to protect against it. AgriVax has been working on a vaccine, made and delivered via a plant, that would protect cows and humans from infection. Funding is also sought to develop a new kind of treatment for multiple sclerosis patients. Instead of training the body to mount a massive immune response to an antigen as a vaccine does, the treatment would, theoretically, train patients' immune systems to ignore an antigen. In this case, the antigen is a normal part of the body- the protein myelin-that the immune system attacks in error in patients with multiple sclerosis, bringing on the debilitating symptoms of the disease. By adding the myelin gene to a plant and then feeding it to MS patients, it may be possible to get the immune system to stop attacking the myelin inside the body.
