Revolutionising Drug Production: How Plant Molecular Farming is Making Pharmaceuticals More Accessible and Affordable

Plant-based pharmaceutical engineering offers advantages over animal cell-based systems, including high-throughput screening, low cost, and widespread drug distribution.

FREMONT, CA: Medical researchers began to pay more attention to plant-based pharmaceutical engineering in the twenty-first century as a result of viral outbreaks like Ebola and coronaviruses. This technological innovation provides cost and accessibility advantages over its mammalian cell-based cousin. Plant-based molecular farming frequently uses nuclear expression and plastid synthesis as engineering tools. Additionally, a pattern has lately begun to emerge, favouring nuclear expression because of its unique properties in the secretory route.

Binary plasmids, such as those present in live organisms like Agrobacterium tumefaciens and Nicotiana benthamiana, are used for nuclear expression. Between the right and left border sequences of their genes, these organisms have sections that create transfer DNA, which is transferred to plant cells and subsequently expressed by the cellular machinery. This particular area is a potential key instrument in molecular framing since it can be utilised to insert alien genetic elements.

The researchers recognised factors that make molecular farming an  ideal way to aid in restraint fast-evolving diseases found today:

On a large scale, potential plants can be screened. More than 1,000 candidates may be screened each week thanks to advanced technologies and expression results can be scaled to whole plants. Compared to values achieved utilising comparable production scales, large-scale screening significantly lowers investment and product costs. In contrast with mammalian cell-based manufacturing facilities, plant-based manufacturing facilities are more adaptable to being built in different locations and environments.

Molecular farming products can be applied using a needle-free spray method and will require less strict packaging and transportation, making it simpler to bring them to hard-to-reach places. Plant-based expression of proteins has been around for about 25-30 years, and during this time, various plant species, vectors, and techniques have been explored, such as using whole plants, cell cultures, transient and stable expression, and expression in different tissues and organs, including seeds. Unfortunately, the diversity of approaches has made it difficult to develop and optimize common tools. Despite this, there are some common processes and techniques that are used in plant production platforms, including the creation or selection of expression vectors, transfer of these vectors into host plants using agrobacteria or biolistic tools, tissue harvesting and extraction, and product purification and analysis. To scale up production, green-house expansions or increasing fermenter capacity for cell cultures are used. While purification and analysis techniques are similar across expression platforms, the vectors and tissue extraction methods are plant-specific.

When compared to animal cell-based expression systems, plant-based pharmaceutical engineering promotes high-throughput screening, quick translation at a large scale, and inexpensive generation of virus-like particles. It has the ability to guarantee the quick and widespread distribution of drugs, making medications more available to those who require them.