Advancing the frontier of plant-based therapeutics: critical innovations in molecular farming and bioprocess Integration.
Gowtham K, Shanmugaraj B, Thangavel LS, Srinivasan A, Malla A
Crispr
Medicines and vaccines of tomorrow may be grown in fields rather than manufactured in expensive industrial facilities, potentially making life-saving treatments cheaper and more accessible to everyone.
Scientists can engineer plants to act like tiny factories, producing medicines, vaccines, and other useful molecules inside their cells. This review brings together the latest tools for doing that more effectively — including precise gene-editing scissors that rewrite a plant's instructions, and smarter ways to extract and purify the useful compounds once they're made. The goal is to make this approach reliable and large-scale enough to actually replace or supplement traditional pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Key Findings
CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing can be applied to rewrite entire metabolic pathways in plants, enabling more precise control over what compounds a plant produces and in what quantities.
Synthetic biology frameworks — essentially pre-designed genetic toolkits — can be layered into plant systems to simultaneously optimize both protein yield and quality, addressing two major bottlenecks at once.
Integrated bioprocessing solutions that combine production and purification steps have shown improvements in purification efficiency, reducing the cost and complexity of bringing plant-made pharmaceuticals to usable form.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers have reviewed and advanced methods for using living plants as biological factories to produce medicines and other valuable compounds. The review highlights new gene-editing tools, improved protein production techniques, and more efficient purification processes that make plant-made pharmaceuticals more practical and scalable.
Abstract Preview
Plant molecular farming (PMF) has emerged as a promising strategy for producing biopharmaceuticals and high-value biomolecules in plant systems. In this review, we present a comprehensive synthesis...
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