Autoimmunity in Insulin-Dependent Diabetes Mellitus

Autoantigens produced in plants for oral tolerance therapy of autoimmune diseases

Oral administration of protein antigens can induce antigen-specific immune hyporesponsiveness and may be useful in treating autoimmune diseases or preventing transplant rejection. However, the therapeutic value of oral tolerance may be limited when candidate autoantigens cannot be produced by conventional system in quantities sufficient for clinical studies. Plants may be ideally suited for this purpose, as they can produce hugh quantities of functional mammalian proteins at extremely competitive cost. Furthermore, transgenic food plants could provide a simple and direct method of autoantigen delivery for oral tolerance. Here we show that the diabetes-associated autoantigen glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) is efficiently expressed in both tobacco and potato plants, and that mice, when fed with fresh transgenic potato tubers, are fully protected from diabetes.