Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
For producing these substances, a broad range of such GM crops have
been successfully grown in the open field including maize, tobacco, rice,
safflower, potato, rape, soybean, and barley.
4
The main drivers of molecular farming seem to be economic and
technical in nature: scaling-up of production of substances by simply
enlarging the cultivated area for such crops is considered an asset over
presently used bioreactors that require expensive high-tech buildings,
machinery, and equipment and a time-consuming process for optimiz-
ing production. This enables producers to quickly adjust to chang-
ing market requirements.
5
Plant molecular farming would also pro-
vide sufficient capacity to manufacture biopharmaceuticals well beyond
10,000 kg/year - which constitutes the highest annual tonnage presently
derived from microbes or mammalian cell lines. This is considered by
the pharmaceutical industry as especially important for producing novel
high-dose antibodies
6
in annual tonnages of 10,000 to 50,000 kg. For such
antibodies, a shortage of conventional production capacities is antici-
pated if relying on production in bioreactors only.
7
Beyond these high-
volume biopharmaceuticals, most presently used therapeutic proteins
are sold at tonnages of much less than 1,000 kg/year. Even in these cases,
it seems tempting to produce this amount by planting a total area of 2 to
40 hectares.
Plants are also an interesting alternative for making proteins that are
difficult or impossible to be produced in microbial systems. The protein
resulting from the same gene might be slightly different in structure and
Material, Protein, and Biodegradable Plastic. 8
Current Opinion in Plant Biology
188-
196 (2005).
4
A. Sauter & B. Husing, Gr une Gentechnik - Transgene Pflanzen der 2. und 3. Gener-
ation (2006), available at www.tab.fzk.de/de/projekt/zusammenfassung/ab104.pdf.
5
I. Raskin et al., Plants and Human Health in the Twenty-first Century. 20
Trends in
Biotechnology
522-531 (2002).
6
Monoclonal antibodies are widely used as diagnostic and research reagents. Their
introduction into human therapy has been much slower. Still, more than 150 antibod-
ies are presently in preclinical and clinical development, many of them aiming at the
treatment of cancer.
7
K. Ko & H. Koprowski, Plant Biopharming of Monoclonal Antibodies, 111
Virus
Research
93-100 (2005).
