The global biologics has seen tremendous growth over the past two decades fueled by advancing technology and a growing understanding of the human body at the molecular level. Biologics, which are medicines derived from living organisms, have revolutionized the treatment of cancer, autoimmune disorders, and other devastating diseases. However, the traditional method of producing biologics in mammalian cell cultures or bacteria is costly, resource-intensive and can face capacity constraints. To meet growing global demand for lifesaving drugs in a more sustainable way, researchers are turning to plant-based expression systems for biomanufacturing.
Plant-Based Biologics: Plants as Living Factories
Plants offer several advantages over traditional production methods. First, plants are very scalable and flexible living production platforms. New technologies allow for rapid generation of stable plant lines expressing the desired protein of interest at high levels. This allows manufacturers to quickly ramp up production capacity to meet market needs. Plants also carry less risk of contaminating biologics with human or animal pathogens. Unlike mammalian cell cultures, plants do not harbor the viruses and prions that pose risks to human health. From a sustainability standpoint, plants require less energy and water compared to industrial fermentation facilities. They also avoid the ethical issues associated with animal testing.
Pioneering Protein Production in Plants
One of the earliest successes in Plant-Based Biologics was the production of vaccines for life-threatening diseases like hepatitis B, cholera and even COVID-19. By using transgenic tobacco, researchers demonstrated plants could reliably produce vaccine antigens identical to those produced in cell culture. This spurred wider exploration of using crops like soy, corn, barley and potato as biofactories to manufacture industrial enzymes, antibodies and other biologic drugs. Today, several plant-made pharmaceuticals have received FDA approval or are in late-stage clinical testing. For example, the first plant-derived enzyme therapy for Gaucher disease gained US approval in 2012. Monoclonal antibodies for cancer and other indications are also emerging from plant biomanufacturing pipelines.
Lowering Costs Without Compromising Quality
A significant driver pushing the industry towards plant-based systems is cost. Traditional fermentation and cell culture methods require expensive growth media, purification equipment and facilities maintained under sterile conditions. By comparison, plants offer very low-cost production and the ability to generate stable, highly productive biomass on vast tracts of arable land with minimal capital investment. As production scales up using fast growing crops, the overall manufacturing costs per gram of protein can potentially drop well below microbial and mammalian systems. Critically, plant expression delivers consistent quality matching that achieved with existing platforms. Sophisticated metabolic and glycosylation engineering ensures plant-derived proteins fold properly and perform as intended in the human body.
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