Perspectives for autoimmune diabetes prevention using plants

Autoimmune diabetes is the most frequent chronic disease of childhood and it is characterised by long-term and severe complications; different therapeutic approaches have been used in order to prevent and to suppress the disease at an experimental level but no one of them reached so far positive results in human trials. However, the results of clinical trials using autoantigen-based therapies suggested new insight for the research of a vaccine. The 65 kDa isoform of human glutamic acid decarboxylase, one of the major autoantigen associated with the disease, is regarded as crucial for future studies on diabetes prevention and suppression. GAD65 is actually produced using conventional expression systems (mainly based on yeast and baculovirus/insect cell) and the final product is characterised by high costs. We exploited plants as a platform for the production of human GAD65 by using stable and transient expression and by engineering the protein at different degrees. Our results indicate that plants are a feasible and versatile system for the production of this recombinant protein. The results obtained in the perspective of new therapeutic approaches are described and discussed.