APPLICATION OF TISSUE CULTURE AND MOLECULAR FARMING IN THE PRODUCTION OF PHARMACEUTICALS

In recent years, after a short period of stagnation, the importance of plants as a source of pharmaceuticals has undergone a resurgence. The reason for this renaissance of plants as a fountain of health and beauty is a sum of many distinct factors. One of these elements is the economic upswing of the Asian countries that has again drawn our attention to the botanical drug market. Traditionally, China is a country where botanical pharma- and nutraceuticals are consumed on a large scale and where these products are fully approved and prescribed, as is also done in many other Asian countries, including Japan and India. A more significant factor contributing to the interest in obtaining new pharmaceuticals from plants is the rapid advancement of molecular technologies. Especially the development of gene transfer methods has facilitated the use of plants as a potential alternative source in the production of pharmaceutical proteins. Recombinant proteins, including vaccines, antibodies, enzymes and regulatory proteins, belong to the rapidly growing sectors in the pharmaceutical industry. The production and expression systems of biologically competitive products should, first of all, be safe and inexpensive to produce. Compared to human and animal cell cultures, plants have several advantages: they are highly scalable, capable of producing biologically active compounds, and free of mammalian viral vectors and pathogens.