Rapid production of therapeutic proteins using plant system

Abstract

Plant molecular farming is simply defined as the production of proteins therapeutics (PT) in plants, which involves transient gene expression in plants and purification of expressed protein to a great scale for diagnosis, treatment and other applications. This is the rapid, economical, safe and reproducible approach for the production of PT as compared to bacterial and mammalian systems. Protein yield and post-translational modifications are the major roadblocks that can be overcome by high expression strategies includes over expression constructs, suitable plant host systems and glycoengineering of proteins. The inherent ability of ideally producing safe, functional protein is the most striking phenomenon recognised by the pharmaceutical industries and developed many therapeutic products within few weeks to meet escalating demands during pandemic/epidemic outbreaks recently.

Virus-Based Vectors: A New Approach for Production of Recombinant Proteins

“…Agroinfiltration is a technique to study plant-pathogen interaction but nowadays is adopted for transient expression studies. 45 In this method, Agrobacterium containing recombinant vector (viral vector) enter the intercellular spaces of the leaves through stomata or wounding the abaxial face of leaves. Infiltration of the whole plant or detached leaves is performed in different ways; the simplest one is shoot infiltration in a bacterial suspension followed by a weak vacuum (approximately 0.8-0.9 Bar) for 10-30 seconds.…”

“…This method is very suitable for the production of high amounts of proteins in plant species such as lettuce and Arabidopsis which cannot be infiltrated by syringe. 45 In this method, the infiltration of Agrobacterium replaces the normal functions of the virus including primary infection and systemic movement. Intracellular multiplication and cell to cell movement are performed by viral replicon.…”

“…Afterwards, downstream processes including leaf homogenization (4-6 days post infiltration), purification, dialysis to remove salts, concentrating and confirming protein efficiency by western blotting or other tests are performed. 45 In this regard, agroinfiltration can quickly assess the activity of a gene construct and speed up analysis of efficiency by the fast production of a protein of interest. This period of recombinant protein production is very suitable compared to the permanent transgenic plants which usually take 6 months.…”

“…63 The most recent reports of the status of pharmaceutical proteins produced in plants to prevent epidemic diseases have been summarized in Table 2. 45…”

Vaccination and Biopharming Technology

“…Plant cells are most suitable for the production of biopharmaceuticals offering the most economical production with simplicity, posttranscriptional modifications and they are free of animal pathogens [57]. Tobacco has huge biomass production capacity.…”