First plant-derived COVID-19 vaccine to enter human clinical trials in Asia
When the pandemic hit Thailand in 2019, Baiya Phytopharm mobilised its BaiyaPharming™ platform to develop a plant-based COVID-19 vaccine — crowdfunded by the Thai public and brought to Phase 1 human trials in under two years.
The challenge
When COVID-19 emerged in late 2019, Thailand — like most of Southeast Asia — was almost entirely dependent on imported vaccines. There was no domestic biopharmaceutical manufacturing capacity capable of responding to a pandemic at speed. The world needed something fundamentally faster.
Baiya Phytopharm saw an opportunity: our BaiyaPharming™ plant-based platform, still in its early stages, had the potential to compress this timeline dramatically.
Our approach
Baiya's scientists focused on producing a recombinant Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) protein of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein using N. benthamiana plants as the expression system. This approach had several key advantages:
- No need for live virus handling during production
- Rapid scale-up using existing greenhouse and cGMP facility infrastructure
- Human-compatible glycosylation profiles from ΔXF plant lines
Two candidates were developed in parallel: Baiya SARS-CoV-2 Vax 1 (targeting the original strain) and Baiya SARS-CoV-2 Vax 2 (updated for emerging variants), allowing the team to iterate and adapt as the virus evolved.
Timeline
Outcomes
What this means for future projects
The COVID-19 vaccine programme validated BaiyaPharming™ at clinical scale under real-world pandemic pressure. The infrastructure built during this programme — the cGMP facility, the regulatory expertise, the clinical development team — is now available to partners seeking to develop their own plant-based biologics.
Whether you are developing a vaccine, a therapeutic antibody, or a recombinant protein for diagnostic or research use, our team has navigated the full journey from gene design to human trials — and can apply that experience to your project.