ABSTRACT
In the past, biopharmaceuticals were produced chiefly by bacterial or yeast fermentation systems or mammalian cell culture. More recently, transgenic animals have been used for the production of biopharmaceuticals (Larrick and Thomas, 2003). The introduction of plants as an expression platform for commercialization of biopharmaceuticals is in its infancy. There are a number of very good reasons why plants make superior production platforms for biopharmaceuticals than conventional microbial fermentation; these points are illustrated in Table 6.1. First and foremost, as plants are higher organisms, they possess an endomembrane system. Plant cells are capable of folding and assembling recombinant proteins in a manner resembling those found in mammalian cells and as a result, they perform similar posttranslational modifications. In this way, antibodies and other multimeric complexes that are biologically functional have been expressed in various plant tissues (see Chapter 5).
