What is it about?
Plants have the capacity to produce protein-based drugs that to date, has been underutilized. This article focuses on recent successes in using plants to produce new drugs and vaccines to help treat and prevent deadly diseases like Ebola.
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Why is it important?
The recent FDA approval of a plant-produced protein drug and the increasing number of plant-produced proteins entering human clinical trials suggests that we are entering a new phase of plant-made pharmaceutical research and development.
Perspectives
The potential of using plants to produce proteins for human pharmaceutical use has been recognized for decades. This field has progressed rather slowly over the years due to the relatively few laboratories pursing this type of research, the lack of a clear regulatory path through the FDA and similar regulatory agencies, and the concomitant reluctance of main-stream pharmaceutical companies to embrace plants as an expression platform to produce biologics. This has now finally changed and I think we will now see a number of plant-produced biologics and vaccines being used to treat patients.
Dr. Keith R. Davis
SativaGen Inc.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The potential of plants as a system for the development and production of human biologics, F1000Research, May 2016, Faculty of 1000, Ltd.,
DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.8010.1.
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