A new method of giving vaccines could be readily available not through needles or other medical means, but rather by the food people eat on a day-to-day basis.

Given the choice of a needle in the arm and a bowl of fried soybean containing a vaccine, which would you prefer? Would you mind if it’s possible to take some vaccines subconsciously while you are eating?

Brice Floyd, a graduate research assistant in plant biology, is testing a protein-expressing pathway in soybean seeds hoping it could work for a future edible vaccine.

“It’s been a problem for a while that no one knows how to package a foreign protein in soybean seeds so they can express a form of protein in a plant,” Floyd said. “People try to improve the protein content of soybeans by transgenics that has not really worked. If this experiment works, there are many applications down the road, including [edible] vaccines.”

Hartinio Nahampun, graduate student in agronomy, is already working on making edible vaccines in corn seed, made especially for the H1N1 virus for swine. Nahampun introduces the expressed antigen by using a genetic engineering approach. The antigen inserted in the corn plant has the potential to be utilized as a universal vaccine so it has the potential to reduce the epidemic caused by this virus.

Putting a vaccine in food supply has many advantages. Floyd said scientists are looking for the most effective way to protect people against diseases, especially in developing and underdeveloped countries. Putting vaccines in the food supply makes this the most efficient way to protect people. No injection would be necessary, which makes it especially children-friendly. It also saves on the costs of needles and other equipment.

Vaccines are costly to produce and sometimes require special storage conditions not readily available in third world countries. For that, vaccines in plants easily solves this problem and makes the storage of vaccines much easier and protects the antigen from degradation.

However, vaccines in food supply is controversial. One reason is that edible vaccines are basically genetically modified, so people would be concerned about the contamination of non-GMO crops, affecting the environment and having risky consequences on human health. The biggest debate is that if someone wants it and grows the plants with vaccine randomly, there is no way to tell.

People also could get vaccines involuntarily. There is no readily available way to discern corn and soybeans with vaccines in the plants from the natural plants, making it hard to regulate the practice.

Such a new method of giving vaccines may have unknown consequences. As Floyd said, the vaccination in food causes illness and death like any other vaccine. No matter how many lives might be saved by a vaccination, there are people who could die from the complication.

So far, positive results are shown on human tests of edible vaccines of hepatitis B and diarrhea. Most scientists are pro-GM, and many are working on the possibility of its actual application of the edible vaccine. But it would still take much time for the decision-makers and the society to be ready for this technology.