Figure 1.

System functionality in the face of a pandemic, and the potential for resilience engineering based on molecular farming in plants. (A) The resilience cycle typically consists of five phases [prevent (dark blue), prepare (light blue), protect (orange), respond (red), and recover (green); Thoma et al., 2016]. Upon encountering a negative event (lightning symbol), the system loses functionality (orange line) compared to the pre-event state (dashed green line) until protect and response measures stabilize it at a certain level and recover measures can begin. (B) Plant molecular farming can improve public health resilience to pandemic disease outbreaks by (1) enabling the large-scale production of vaccines that reduce virus spreading and the likelihood of recurrent outbreaks, (2) facilitating faster response and recovery by rapidly providing diagnostics, emergency vaccines, and therapeutics, and (3) thereby minimizing the loss of system functionality (green line). A prerequisite to deliver these benefits is that sufficient production capacity is built before the event, during the prepare phase. For comparison, the original time points of phase transitions in (A) are shown as dashed vertical lines in (B). The time and functionality scales are in arbitrary units but drawn to scale between panels (A,B). The curves illustrate typical scenarios but are not quantitative.