Biopharmaceuticals such as antibodies are usually produced using animal cells. Yet, plant cells have the advantage of being easier to cultivate and cheaper than animal cells.
A domestic bio company has developed a plant factory platform that can produce vaccines or antibody treatments from plants, not animals.
One of the pharmaceutical firms in Korea is growing lettuce in a special indoor space. By optimizing cultivation conditions such as temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide, plants can grow comfortably. This lettuce is very small than regular lettuce. Instead of being small, we genetically modified it to produce vitamin D that ordinary lettuce cannot produce. A specific gene that blocks the production of vitamin D in lettuce was removed with genetic scissors.
In another space, we have a plant called Nicotiana Ventamiana, which is a genus of tobacco leaves. The researchers removed certain genes in the plant that can cause human toxicity so that the plant can produce antibody treatments and vaccines. When proteins are expressed in plants, they have complex sugar structures, and if they are applied to the human body, they can cause excessive immune responses, so we removed them through genetic correction.
It developed a kind of plant factory platform that can produce medicines through plants. The company used this to develop actual COVID-19 vaccine candidate materials and published research results in the international academic journal Vaccine. The protein made from plants (COVID-19 vaccine candidate material) and protein vaccine candidate material made from insect cells came out last year in China. It was found to be more than twice as effective as that.
The company is developing a vaccine for severe febrile thrombocytopenia syndrome, a tick-borne infectious disease, as well as COVID-19 using the plant factory platform developed. It has also succeeded in extracting candidate substances for breast cancer treatments from the same plant, and is preparing for a preclinical experiment.
It is noteworthy that a plant factory platform that is easier to raise and cheaper than animal cells will be a new breakthrough in drug development.
Writer: Grace Jun
(Picture from Unsplash)
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