Review

Pharmaceutical proteins produced in plant bioreactor in recent years

Zhengquan He¹, Xiaochun Du¹, Wei Yao¹ and Jianwu Dai^1,2*

¹Biotechnology Research Center/Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Natural Products Research and Development, China Three Gorges University, Yichang 443002, P.R. China.

²Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, P.R. China.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: jwdai@genetics.ac.cn.

Accepted 8 December, 2008

Plant bioreactor, also called molecular farming, has enormous potential to produce recombinant proteins infinitely. Products expressed in plants have natural physico-chemical properties and bioactivities. Plant bioreactor could be a safe, economic and convenient production system, and can been widely applied in industries and agricultures, especially in the life science and pharmaceutical industry. The applica-tion of transgenic plant in the production of vaccines, antibodies and pharmaceutical proteins has become a hot point in the plant genetic engineering in recent years. However, there are some limiting factors of application such as yield, downstream processing and so on. Here we review and discuss the advantages and research progress for the pharmaceutical plant bioreactors in recent three years, focusing on the existing problems and new strategies in this area.

Key words: Plant bioreactor, pharmaceutical proteins.