By Dr Guy Tropper, Executive Vice President, Co-Founder<\/p>\n
Biologics, a class of medications made of complex proteins have come to widespread use in the past two decades, changing the lives of millions of people with cancer, autoimmune and a host of other illnesses. Among these, all with a generic name ending in \u201c\u2026mab.\u201d Until now, these have been manufactured in large sterile tanks providing a very controlled environment<\/strong> for bacteria, fungi and other types of cells tasked with producing such biopharmaceuticals. mRNA-based vaccines are also produced using such \u201cbioreactors.\u201d It takes years, a lot of people with special expertise and considerable financial investments to set-up manufacturing sites using such technology<\/strong> for a limited range of biologics. These factors certainly play a role in the often eye-watering cost of medications of this kind.<\/p>\n Taking advantage of plant versatility<\/strong><\/p>\n Another approach to the production of such \u201cbiologics\u201d takes advantage of the versatility of plants. We have learned a lot in the past 30 years about how to better harness the power of plants in t<\/strong>his regard. Sophisticated knowledge of plant cell biology has brought the opportunity of uniquely competitive advantages in biomanufacturing<\/strong>. More recent techniques of such plant-based manufacturing use a process called \u201ctransient expression\u201d where plant leaves are purposefully \u201ctransfected\u201d, a term to describe temporary genetic instructions to prompt the biology of plant cells to produce the desired biologic.<\/p>\n Large pharmaceutical companies have so far tended to favor bioreactor-based approaches to biomanufacturing on the basis of past experience and reliability. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole is known to be rather conservative and significant technological changes are established slowly. It will take young, savvy biotech companies like ANGANY to come up with their own products brought to commercial success before the industry as a whole takes a more attentive look at the strategic importance of plant-based biomanufacturing. The pressure to provide an ever-wider range of medications while keeping these accessible will inexorably bring us to this technological transition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Dr Guy Tropper, Executive Vice President, Co-Founder Biologics, a class of medications made of complex proteins have come to widespread use in the past two decades, changing the lives…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n