Plant derived therapeutic proteins is a vigorously growing field. As new generation bioreactors, plants bring several advantages versus traditional expression systems: cost effectiveness, enormous scale up and down abilities and being mammalian pathogens free, bioreactors.
While it was successfully demonstrated that plants could produce adequate quantities of functional human proteins, the isolation and purification of recombinant proteins from plant tissue was largely neglected. Therefore, downstream processing of plant tissue in relation to therapeutic proteins production, as well as posttranslational modifications which differ between plants and animals, the immunogenicity of therapeutic glycoproteins produced in plants, remains open for scientific discovery and innovation.
Students: Tzvi Zvirin, Ofri Launer, Zohar Katz
Figure: Production of therapeutic proteins in plants process illustration