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[SANET-MG] humanized rice to treat allergy



Humanized GM rice to treat allergy yesterday was featured in news articles. The theory behind the development is interesting and may lead to an avalanche of GM pharm crops humanized to fight allergies such as cat, dust mites, nuts, etc. The use of T cell epitope peptides to treat allergy and autoimmunity has exploded in the past decade. The T cell epitope for the Japanese cedar pollen allergy peptide are used to create oral tolerance (oral intake of allergens to create tolerance by causing the immune system to regard the allergen as food and thus safe). The epitope peptide is selected , cutting out the parts of the original protein triggering the allergy response , sneezing, coughing , etc). Inducing oral tolerance relieves the allergic response to cedar pollen. introducing the T cell epitope into rice is achieved by introducing the human gene segment specifying the epitope into the rice genome so that a rice meal should prevent the allergic response to cedar pollen. The human epitopr gene was driven by a rice glutelin promoter, followed by a glutelin signal peptide sequence, a rice endoplasmic retention signal and a transcription termination gene from rice glutelin. The gene insert cassette also included a hygromycin antibiotic resistance gene driven by a CaMV promoter and transcription was terminated by a agropine sequence. The use of humanized rice to treat allergy has a potential ability to pollute the rice food crop with human genes and an antibiotic resistance gene. However, there is little doubt that the use of human T cell epitope peptides produced in crop plants to treat a wide array of allergies and autoimmune diseases is going to be a major focus in the very near future. It is important to insure that these humanized crops are adequately tested for safety to humans and to the environment.

Plant Biotechnology Journal
Volume 3 Issue 5 Page 521  - September 2005
doi:10.1111/j.1467-7652.2005.00143.x
Oral immunotherapy against a pollen allergy using a seed-based peptide vaccine Hidenori Takagi1, Saburo Saito2, Lijun Yang1, Seiji Nagasaka3, Naoko Nishizawa3 and Fumio Takaiwa1,*
Summary

Peptide immunotherapy using dominant T-cell epitopes is safer and more effective than conventional immunotherapy for the treatment of immunoglobulin E (IgE)-mediated allergic diseases. When allergenic T-cell epitope peptides are expressed in the edible part of transgenic plants, successful mucosal immune tolerance to these allergens may be attainable by the consumption of these plants. In this study, we generated transgenic rice seed that accumulated high concentrations (about 60 µg per grain) of polypeptide consisting of seven dominant human T-cell epitopes derived from the Japanese cedar pollen allergens, Cry j 1 and Cry j 2, in the endosperm. Oral administration of these transgenic rice seeds to B10.S mice before or after they were immunized with Cry j 1 holoprotein reduced not only their T-cell proliferative response to Cry j 1, but also their serum IgE levels, proving the efficacy of oral immunotherapy for the treatment of pollinosis.


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