PlantPharm BioMed’s oral solid dose vaccine production platform makes us uniquely positioned to capture market share for a variety of vaccines for farmed, wild or domestic animals. Addressing vaccination in animals – wild, farmed or companion, can help to eliminate the spread of zoonotic diseases – which are illnesses caused by germs (viruses, bacteria, parasite and fungi) that can spread between animals and people.

Animal pathogens, such as African Swine Fever affecting pork, Avian Influenza Virus impacting poultry, and Acute Hepatopancreatic Necrosis Disease affecting fish, mollusks, and shellfish, pose a significant threat to the supply of these critical human food resources. The industry is currently lacking effective vaccines to counter these diseases. As commercial demand increases, crowded conditions lead to increased disease risks to these farmed animals. Additionally, the combination of low genetic diversity and elevated stress levels further weaken the immune systems of farmed animals, making them more susceptible to infections. In response to this challenge, PlantPharm aims to offer Oral Solid Dose vaccines as pelletized feed additives to address and mitigate these issues. There are substantial economic reasons that an OSD is a more practical disease prevention strategy providing cost savings at every step in the process.

In addition to farmed animals, PlantPharm’s pelletized feed vaccine delivery via a bait-station, eliminates the need to contain wildlife to deliver manual hypodermic vaccinations. It has been proven that non-human, unvaccinated reservoirs of COVID-19 and its variants remain in several wild animal populations and can be the source of additional human infections and additional viral mutations. New research in the US has shown that white-tailed deer are being infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans. This discovery precipitated the collaboration of the USDA APHIS in commissioning PlantPharm BioMed in the development and production of a pelletized feed delivery vaccine for white-tailed deer. The introduction of this vaccine at the source, will help to eliminate the potential spillover of COVID-19 infections back to humans. This project will be a launching pad for PlantPharm to enter the commercial animal vaccine space.