Project GreenVax Promises to Shorten Vaccine Manufacturing Time

The Texas Plant-Expressed Vaccine Consortium launched Project GreenVax, a biotherapeutic manufacturing initiative that is designed to show proof-of-concept for a technology that could reduce the time to produce vaccines for infectious disease.

Project GreenVax, which uses tobacco plants rather than the current egg-based vaccine technology, promises to shorten vaccine production to a fraction of the current time, allowing rapid response to newly emerging viruses. The majority of funding for the project is provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The consortium, comprising G-Con, LLC, and the Texas A&M University System, designed Project GreenVax for a projected final-scale capacity of 100 million doses per month. The flexibility of the plant-based system, combined with its low cost and ability to massively scale, may provide vaccine protection not only to citizens of the US, but also to many parts of the world that cannot currently afford vaccines.

Project GreenVax will be headquartered on a secure, 21-acre site on the campus of the Texas A&M Health Science Center in Bryan, TX. The custom-designed 145,000 square foot biotherapeutic production facility will be constructed and managed by G-Con. G-Con will integrate its proprietary modular, mobile, cleanroom pods in which the specialized purification and laboratory equipment will be located. These pods, as well as the flexible processes and facility design that led to the GreenVax project, were designed and developed for the National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing—a core biological pharmaceutical manufacturing, research, and education facility now in construction on the Texas A&M University campus under the management of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, and supported by the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.