Molecular Farming through Plant Engineering: A Cost-Effective Approach for Producing Therapeutic and Prophylactic Proteins

Plants are ideal platforms for bulk production of rapid response vaccines and therapeutics for controlling potential pandemics, widespread epidemics and bioterrorism attacks. Stable expression is achieved through nuclear and plastid transformations while transient expression is achieved through Agrobacterium mediated or with the help of plant viral vectors. Many efficient cloning systems have been developed for transient expression of therapeutic proteins in plants. Plant-made VLPs seems to be the effective immunological formulation for tackling chikungunya due to low-cost of production since it is endemic in developing countries. Plants as biofactories for mAbs production will unlock this potential for some major products to be produced in tonnes of quantities. Plants are ideal for producing safer and effective biobetters due to the possibility of producing therapeutics with specific and mammalian glycoforms using glyco-engineered plant hosts which is presently not possible by existing conventional cell culture systems.