The Use of Transgenic Plants for Production of Therapeutically Valuable Proteins.

Over the last 15 years a growing number of research groups worldwide have focused on plants as biofactories for the production of heterologous proteins. The reason is that plants provide a number of advantages over conventional recombinant systems including low cost, increased safety and scalable production, among others. The skepticism that received this technology when first envisaged has turned into a cautious optimism. A wide variety of proteins can be produced in plants and they are almost indistinguishable from their native counterparts. Even though there are still several issues that need refining such as boosting expression and ensuring correct post-translational processing and protein stability in plant tissues, molecular farming can potentially provide unlimited quantities of recombinant proteins for use as diagnostic and therapeutic tools. The low cost of plant-based vaccines make them ideal for large-scale programs in poor countries. During the talk, a comparison of different expression systems and the results obtained at CINVESTAV Irapuato on expression of different biopharmaceutical proteins will be discussed.