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Producing Biologics in Tobacco
Tobacco is a model system for manipulating DNA in
plants -- some have referred to tobacco as the "white mouse"
of the plant kingdom. While tobacco as a laboratory bench model
is widely embraced, only a few companies have invested in taking
tobacco-produced biologics into production scale levels; corn appears
to be a more popular choice for commercial-scale production.
As a biologic production vehicle tobacco has both advantages and
drawbacks. One advantage (relative to corn) is increased environmental
and human safety. From the standpoint of containment, transgenic
tobacco is either harvested before reaching maturity or tops are
cut so that the transgenic tobacco does not flower. Thus, gene flow
can be minimized. Also,  one
biotech company has patented a system in which the target biologic
is not expressed in the transgenic tobacco plants in the field,
but rather, protein expression occurs post-harvest in the laboratory.
Such delay in protein production minimizes exposure to non-target
organisms. Perhaps even more compelling from a safety standpoint,
tobacco is a non-food crop, and thus chances of contamination of
the food supply are minimal.
One drawback of producing biologics in tobacco is that the tobacco
biomass has to be processed immediately post-harvest (while corn
has the advantage of stably storing the target biologic in its seed).
Thus biopharming with transgenic tobacco may lead to hills and valleys
of production.
While the potential exists to produce pharmaceutically important
proteins in tobacco, all products are presently in the developmental
phases of research.
Click here to learn
about tobacco bio-pharming companies...
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