Eggs are low-cost, natural bioreactors, enabling the large-scale production of vaccine proteins and biologics.

We learn how to make vaccine proteins in research laboratories, producing
quantities that are only sufficient to prove that we have made the correct protein, and that it has the right biological properties. In other words, “it does what it says on the tin”. Turning this into a vaccine requires “scaling-up” or having the capacity to make millions of doses. The genetic code to produce the vaccine protein is injected into the eggs, which in turn make the exact proteins as per the instructions. The vaccine is then extracted from the eggs and purified.