Pharming the Fields
Background
How are Plant-Made Pharmaceuticals Really Made?
In order to make a plant-made pharmaceutical (PMP), a plant must be transformed with a desired gene to produce pharmaceutical compounds, generally proteins. Common plants used for PMP trials are corn, tobacco, and rice. Tobacco is one of the most popular crops for PMPs because it is a non-food crop, it grows quickly, and has many leaves for high level protein production. The animation the the left and the video to the right detail the numerous steps in creating a transgenic plant for a plant made pharmaceutical.
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Why Plants?
Below lists the benefits of pharmeceuticals made from trasngenic plants.
Cost Effective
Crop pharmaceutical production is much more cost effective than existing production methods of pharmaceuticals. Fermentation facilities (used for yeast and bacteria to express certain genes) are very expensive, costing 300 to 500 million dollars to build.
More Diversity in Pharmaceuticals
Plants can produce proteins of greater complexity that that of microorganisms due to their ability to glycosylate (the addition of a sugar molecule causing a protein to fold uniquely) on their own. The way a protein is folded determines it's function, therefore, plants have the possibility to produce more complex proteins without assistance.
Large Production
Plant production can be easily scaled up (or down) in comparison to current production methods. A particular plant whose production can be easily scaled up is the tabacco plant. Tabacco grows quickly and yields many proteins for pharmaceuticals, easily creating a large production of plant-made pharmaceuticals
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