Plants have been used for centuries by human communities to treat various diseases. Various methods are already in use in biopharmaceutical productions, for example, bacteria, yeast, mammalian cells and transgenic animals. In recent years, more and more research has been done on biopharming, in another word Plant-Made Pharmaceuticals (PMPs), as plants generally has lower production cost and can have high production yield. Other important advantages include lack of human or animal pathogens, oncogenic DNA sequences and endotoxins from mammalian cells or transgenic animals that could contaminate the final produce, and plants can produce more complex proteins than bacteria.
One possible application of plant produced pharmaceutical recombinant protein is the production of Tuberculosis antigens. Tuberculosis (TB) is a re-emerging disease that infects one-third of the world population, resulting annually in 8 million new cases and2-2.5 million deaths. In current technology vaccinations with Bacille Calmetle-Guerin (BCG) strain of Mycobacterium bovis is used as protection against TB which was implemented worldwide since 1921. However, BCG confers limited protection against adult pulmonary TB, interferes with skin tests for diagnostic and epidemiological survey, and is highly susceptible to environmental constraints, such as cold chain interruption. Therefore another approach will be needed to consider in the production of vaccines. This project is currently under research, and is part of the European Commission-funded Pharma-Planta project, aimed at developing and mastering production of pharmaceuticals in plants and focusing on TB as a model.
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