Posted on 10/09/2021 10:25:46 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Down a dusty farm track in Chilean wine country, behind a wooden gate wrapped in chains, forestry experts are nursing a plantation of saplings whose bark holds the promise of potent vaccines.
Quillay trees, technically known as Quillaja saponaria, are rare evergreens native to Chile that have long been used by the indigenous Mapuche people to make soap and medicine. In the past few years, they have also been used to make a highly successful vaccine against shingles and the world’s first malaria vaccine, as well as foaming agents for products in the food, beverage and mining industries.
Now two saponin molecules, made from the bark of branches pruned from older trees in Chile’s forests, are being used for a COVID-19 vaccine developed by drugmaker Novavax Inc. The chemicals are used to make an adjuvant that reportedly boosts the immune system.
Over the next two years, Maryland-based Novavax plans to produce billions of doses of the vaccine, mostly for low and middle-income countries, which would make it one of the largest COVID-19 vaccine suppliers in the world.
With no reliable data on how many healthy quillay trees are left in Chile, experts and industry officials are divided on how quickly the supply of older trees could be depleted by rising demand.
However, nearly everyone agrees that industries relying on quillay extracts would at some point need to switch to trees grown in plantations or a lab-grown alternative.
A Reuters analysis of export data from trade data provider ImportGenius showed that the supply of older trees is under increasing pressure. Exports of quillay products more than tripled to more than 3,600 tonnes per year in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ricardo San Martin, who developed the pruning and extraction process that created the modern quillay industry, said that producers must immediately work toward making quillay products from younger, plantation-grown trees.
“My estimate four years ago was that we were heading toward the sustainability limit,” he said.
San Martin said he has toiled through the pandemic in the basement of his oceanfront cabin in Sea Ranch, California, to refine a process that could help produce saponins from leaves and twigs to maximize the yield.
“I am working as though this needs to be done yesterday,” said San Martin, who is also sponsoring a project in which drones would count quillay trees in remote and hard-to-access forests, to determine how many are left.
Quillay producers and their customers say the harvest can continue for now without decimating the supply of older trees.
“We continue to monitor the situation in Chile, in close collaboration with our supplier, but at this time we are confident in our supply,” Novavax said in a statement.
The company also said it was confident that uses such as “life-saving vaccines will be prioritized.”
The desert-plant extract company Desert King International Ltd, which runs the Casablanca plantation, is Novavax’s sole supplier of quillay extracts and Chile’s largest quillay exporter by far.
Desert King general manager of Chile and natural response Andres Gonzalez said it is set to produce enough quillay extract from older trees to make up to 4.4 billion vaccine doses next year.
With new supplies from privately owned native forests, they have enough raw material to meet demand for the rest of this year and part of the next, he said.
Gonzalez said the company, where San Martin is a consultant, has built a new production plant and has the capacity to supply other interested pharmaceutical firms — all without harming the forests.
However, he said that “at some point these native forests will come to an end.”
“We want to start having very productive plantations, and we are working on that,” he said.
A relatively small volume of quillay extract is required to make vaccines — just under 1mg per dose — but the supply is stretched by the demand from other industries. Quillay products are used, for instance, as a natural additive in animal feed, a biopesticide and an agent to reduce pollution in mining.
Individual quillay trees grow outside of Chile, but Chile is the only country where mature quillay is harvested from forests in large quantities.
Novavax’s adjuvant, known as Matrix-M, contains two key saponin molecules. One of those, called QS-21, is more difficult to access because it is found mainly in trees that are at least 10 years old.
Among major pharmaceutical companies, only GlaxoSmithKline PLC and Novavax have bet heavily on QS-21, a relatively new pharmaceutical ingredient.
GSK’s highly successful vaccine against shingles, Shingrix, and several other promising experimental vaccines contain QS-21 supplied by Desert King.
In a statement, GSK said it has “no specific challenges relating to sustainable supply” of QS-21.
The quillay-based adjuvant used in Shingrix is also part of the world’s first malaria vaccine, Mosquirix.
The WHO on Wednesday said that it should be widely given to African children, marking what could be a major advance against malaria.
No other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers are relying on quillay bark extracts. Some drugmakers are developing synthetic alternatives, but these could be years from regulatory approval. Switching out the ingredients in any existing vaccine would require new clinical studies to prove the product is safe and effective.
The Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company Agenus stopped selling bark-derived QS-21 several years ago to focus full-time on trying to grow it from quillay plant cells in a laboratory.
“The shortage of QS-21 has been an issue for a while,” Agenus vice president of strategic initiatives and growth exploration Jason Paragas said. “We saw it before COVID, and we made the hard decision that we had to change.”
Paragas said it is too soon to say when an alternative could be ready.
Entrepreneur Gaston Salinas said his Davis, California-based start-up Botanical Solution Inc can already produce QS-21 from quillay tissue starting with seeds in the lab, and aims to eventually produce the chemical on a large scale to supply pharmaceutical companies.
“You cannot afford to over-exploit the native Chilean forest because of a desire to develop modern vaccines. You need to find other ways to develop your products, even if it’s something so important,” he said.
Inside the gate of the carefully guarded Desert King plantation, gardeners carefully tend to the young trees using fertilizers and bountiful supplies of water. They were cloned from full-grown cousins whose dusty gray bark is especially rich in saponins.
If all goes well, the plantation could be producing for one customer in two to three years, Desert King business development manager Damian Hiley said.
He declined to name the company.
Desert King has its eye on future vaccines, some already in the works.
In early 2020, for instance, GSK licensed an experimental tuberculosis vaccine that contains GSK’s QS-21-based adjuvant to the Bill and Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute. It showed promising results in a mid-stage trial.
In April, researchers at Oxford University announced that a new malaria vaccine containing Novavax’s Matrix-M adjuvant appeared to be highly effective in a trial involving 450 children in Burkina Faso.
Gustavo Cruz, a researcher at the University of Chile who worked with San Martin to industrialize production of quillay, said he generally trusts quillay producers to manage supply and demand. He is more worried about other threats — specifically drought and fire.
“The trees do eventually regrow, but there comes a time when they don’t anymore,” he said.
Flying cars.
Pills for men that regrow hair.
ColdFusion.
The end to daylight savings time.
Novavax.
Sounds very similar to Cinchona (Cinchona) Dried Bark....aka quinine/HCQ.
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2021/are-abortion-free-covid-19-vaccines-on-the-way
Update 6/15/21: Recently, the Lozier Institute learned that Sanofi-GSK used abortion-derived HEK293T cells to produce pseudovirus in some of their confirmatory lab tests. This was also the case for the Inovio and Novavax vaccine candidates mentioned in the article, the latter of which was reported this week to be close to seeking FDA approval. While none of those three vaccines used abortion-derived cell lines in the design, development or production of their vaccines they did wind-up “abortion-tainting” their vaccines in the confirmatory lab tests.
I pass.
The cure is in a bottle of Balvenie 12yr, 30yr or 14 year Caribbean....
It’s not actually a vaccine - I guess they just call anything a vaccine now. Well, I have to go walk the transmission and feed the garden rake.
Adjuvant: ingredient to make the immune system start reacting to things it wouldn’t otherwise react to. Useful for creating autoimmune disease.
“Sounds very similar to Cinchona”
You beat me to it.
In most adverse reactions, the problem is not the adjuvant but that an abnormally sensitive individual has reacted badly to the antigen or to chicken egg protein that has slipped though the antigen purification process.
Novavax is highly regarded by many medical experts because it is pioneering a new and better method of vaccine production that relies on identifying key antigens from a pathogen, producing those antigens quickly and in abundance using not chicken eggs but genetically modified insect bacteria, and then adding its mild, plant based adjuvant with a favorable safety profile to finish the vaccine.
In concept at least, this should result in vaccines that are safer because they have a reduced risk of adverse reactions.
;-)
GMTA.
“Adjuvant: ingredient to make the immune system start reacting to things it wouldn’t otherwise react to. Useful for creating autoimmune disease.”
you totally nailed it ...
In a nutshell, you administer something intended to increase antigenicity. What could go wrong?
The discussion of adverse reactions in paragraphs one and two of your post tacitly assumes the reactions are prompt and consistent. If so, no problem, the system works. This may not always be true. If adjuvants could cause antigenicity to lets say hundreds of thousands of self epitopes which somehow were not properly eliminated during the time the immune system was eliminating memory cells carrying receptors which matched self protein epitopes. In this case, there would not be a sufficient cluster of the same AE to prove the association.
Also autoimmune diseases often develop slowlover decades before they become severe, and are very often not reported, not diagnosed, or misdiagnosed.
My comments were not pointed at Novavax or even this adjuvant in particular. I conjecture that adjuvants ( perhaps only some) are responsible ( in part)ii for the epidemic of strange autoimmune diseases and chronic undiagnosed conditions in America.
As I posted once before ( with some edits) There is probably an autoimmune disease for every kind of tissue in the body. The old Medical Mysteries show had some suffering person in almost every episode ( three different mysteries per episode) who spent decades and went through many doctors to finally find out they had an autoimmune disease attacking either their arterial epithelium, their nerve cell sheath, cartilage, ureter, etc etc, in almost every episode. These rare autoimmune diseases were finally diagnosed by a researcher or second or third level specialist.
It is likely vaccine adjuvants cause ( or prime) people to develop autoimmune disease, but the autoimmune diseases are so many and varied, so difficult to diagnose, frequently have sporadic symptoms related to stress, etc, and often take so long to show up, that causation by a vaccination can’t be proven. This is the mechanism by which anthrax vaccinations during the Gulf War in the 90s are suggested to have caused the amorphous cluster of diseases called Gulf War Syndrome.
Infections sometimes trigger autoimmune disease. So does stress. Something happens whereby self proteins previously tolerated become confused with non-self. It would be surprising if adjuvants didn’t.
That’s what I was thinking. I’ve been using cinchona bark for a year and a half now to make tonic water.
Wow...you make your own, with the bark? Nice!
We have quinine tincture that we make our tonic water with...I add a drop of stevia drops....tastes 100% better than the horrid diet tonic. (Regular tonic water is too sweet, for us.)
Fevertree makes a light version of tonic, but we still like our homemade version a lot better.
flr
Yes fever tree is good. The only one that is. But it’s expensive so I ordered cinchona bark and have a recipe to brew tonic water with. For the simlup part I’ve been using erythritol and sugar mixed, about half of what the recipe calls for.
Until recently I didn’t know about the tincture or extract but I will definitely change it up next time. So much easier!
I went through progressively worsening allergies in early adulthood. The usual antiallergy remedies kept me going for years but did not prevent the eventual collapse of my health to the point of near disability. Finally, I figured out that the root cause was celiac disease, with a gluten free diet and vitamin and mineral supplements restoring my health.
Yet, even at the worst when it seemed that almost anything could trigger an allergy attack, never once did I get anything but a sore arm for a day or so from the occasional routine vaccine. Even when I could not stand being around new clothes in a store for more than a few minutes because the sizing and dyes triggered sneezing, tears, and my eyes closing shut, I could still tolerate being vaccinated.
Are adjuvants and vaccines always utterly safe for everyone? Of course not, but in the aggregate, the odds are heavily in favor of their safety and effectiveness when developed and used properly. In the balance between disease burden and vaccine risk, a vaccine is usually the best choice, with everyone free to make the decision for themselves.
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