Abstract

Plants have a long history of use in medicine, with many important drugs being based on chemicals identified or extracted from plants. However, the use of whole plants as a source of therapeutic biologics has gained only modest traction since the inception of ‘molecular pharming’. Molecular pharming turns an individual plant into a miniature bioreactor capable of producing a wide range of recombinant proteins.  Using a proprietary transient expression technology, at Leaf Expression Systems, target protein is produced inside the cells of whole plants in a highly scalable process with lower upstream costs compared to traditional protein production technologies. Our protein expression platform is proven in the production of a variety of biologics covering therapeutic agents, vaccines and diagnostic tools. Scaling up is the next step in the future of molecular pharming.