PLANTS AS BIOFACTORIES FOR THE PRODUCTION OF BIOPHARMACEUTICALS: A BRIEF REVIEW

Plant genetic engineering is conventionally used for transferring beneficial traits to plants. However in recent years the application of this technology for the production of commercially valuable simple or complex therapeutic proteins and industrial enzymes makes it more important and emerging field of study. The whole plant or plant parts or plant cell culture have been used for the production of biopharmaceuticals like cytokines, blood proteins, milk proteins, hormones, antibodies or antibody fragments, metabolic enzymes, hormones, antigens or vaccine epitopes and many more biological molecules used in animal, specially human health care. Safe, cost effective and considerable high level of recombinant protein production with the ability to properly fold and assemble eukaryotic proteins makes it an alternative competitive system with microbial and mammalian hosts. The increase in recombinant protein production varies with varying host plant species, transformation strategies, location of protein accumulation and the expression of foreign gene which can be optimized. Some of the strategies used till date to optimize the process with their success stories, have been discussed in this review. Although the increases in protein accumulation and their safe downstream processing is vital factor, but the acceptance of this technology also depends on human acceptance which also seems to be promising.