ABSTRACT
Humans fight with disease is legendary and the advent of new technologies in science has catered to that need. Recent progress in virology leading to understandings about virus structure and infectivity have shown that it is related with the capsid protein, which is solely responsible for budding of infectious virus during the lytic cycle. The understanding of capsid protein led to the development of new avenues for vaccine and therapy against infectious virus. This involved use of expressing capsid proteins only to form virus like particles (VLPs) which resembles morphologically a virus minus the genetic material, thus making it non-infectious. Until now, most important strategy for vaccination had been use of attenuated virus, which has many serious medical hazardous issues and requires very rigorous preparation conditions. Hence alternative technology of VLPs, which are easy to produce, and safe to handle are very helpful. Production of VLPs needs a robust expression system, Silkworms are well suited with scaling up options at industrial scales. This chapter intends to show the use of silkworms to produce VLPs and discuss its merits and demerits as a new age biomaterial for vaccine and drug delivery applications.
