Fighting H1N1 with Tobacco Plants
Original article from: Bostonia, By Amy Laskowski
After decades of demonization as a health menace, the tobacco plant is about to become a source of potentially lifesaving medicines, thanks in part to the work of Andre Sharon. Sharon leads a team that built a fully automated factory that uses synthetically altered tobacco plants to grow vaccines for some of the world’s most deadly viruses, including H1N1, yellow fever, and malaria, as well as for emerging biological threats.
Those efforts have earned Sharon, a College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering and the director of the Fraunhofer USA Center for Manufacturing Innovation (CMI), based at Boston University, the 2013 Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize. The prize was presented on June 10 in Hannover, Germany, at a gala attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.