Circa 2020
TOKYO — As scientists the world over scramble to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus, Kyushu University professor Takahiro Kusakabe and his team are working to develop a unique vaccine using silkworms.
In his project, each of the worms is a factory that manufactures a type of protein to serve as the key material for vaccine production. Kusakabe said it is possible to create an oral vaccine and aims to start clinical tests on humans in 2021.
In a building on the Kyushu University campus in Fukuoka, in western Japan, “we have about 250,000 silkworms in about 500 different phylogenies (family lines),” Kusakabe said.