PLAPROVA is a collaborative project between the EU  - including SCRI - and Russia with participation of South Africa that aims to develop a rapid plant-based system to produce and assess the capacity of different proteins to act as vaccines against important diseases of livestock such as avian influenza and blue tongue.

The €4 million project consortium comprises seven key research teams in six EU countries, four teams in Russia and one team in South Africa.

The PLAPROVA consortium will exploit transient expression systems recently developed by the partners that can produce amounts of protein suitable for testing within weeks, rather than in months. This means that large-scale screening for candidate vaccines is now within reach, allowing products for which there is no conventional counterpart to be produced.

Initially, the consortium will concentrate on diseases of importance to farming in both the EU and Russia, which includes Avian influenza, blue tongue, foot and mouth disease and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome. Proteins identified through this screening programme will be developed for large-scale production and ultimately low-cost production of effective vaccines.

The coordinator of the project is Professor George Lomonossoff (John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK). The SCRI team is represented by Professor Michael Taliansky as the SCRI Principal Investigator and Dr Sean Chapman as the Co-Investigator.