world’s first plant-derived Covid-19 vaccine has been cleared for use in Canada for adults aged 18 to 64. Canadian regulators said on Thursday that Medicago's two-dose vaccine was authorised based on a study of 24,000 adults.
It found that the vaccine was 71% effective at preventing Covid-19 — although that was before the Omicron variant emerged. It was 75% effective against the highly-infectious delta variant and nearly 89% effective against the gamma variant first identified in Brazil.
The vaccine, named Covifenz, was jointly developed by Medicago Inc., a biopharma company owned by Mitsubishi Chemical and Philip Morris and based in Quebec City, and GlaxoSmithKline Plc.
Medicago uses plants as living factories to grow virus-like particles, which mimic the spike protein that coats the coronavirus.