Quillaja: tree bark helps fight Covid-19 – and other diseases (video)

The most important natural resource of a new COVID-19 vaccine is growing here in the Chilean wine-growing region of Casablanca: the so-called soap bark tree. The bark of the Quillaja trees has always been used by the indigenous Mapuche people to make soap and medicines. It has already been used to manufacture a successful vaccine against shingles and the world’s first vaccine against malaria. Now two substances from the bark of older trees are used in a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Maryland-based company Novavax. The substances serve to strengthen the immune response to the actual vaccine. Novavax plans to produce billions of doses over the next two years, mostly for low and middle income countries. Since there is no reliable data on how many healthy soap bark trees there are in Chile, no one knows how quickly the supply of trees will be exhausted by the increasing demand. Sooner or later, the industry will have to switch to plantation trees, explains Ricardo San Martin, who developed the necessary harvest and extraction process. “It’s a unique resource and we have to take care of it – if we don’t care, nobody will. And we should learn how to produce the extract in Chile.” Quillaja producers and their customers are of the opinion that the harvest can continue for the time being without decimating the population of older trees. Andres Gonzalez, managing director of the sole supplier for Novavax, said they will be producing enough extract from older trees to make up to 4.4 billion vaccine doses by 2022. Only a relatively small amount of the substance is required to manufacture vaccines – just under a milligram per dose. Supply and demand are just one problem. As a natural resource, the trees are also subject to threats such as drought and fire.