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Private Sector Tobacco Bio-Pharming
Three biotech companies intend to use tobacco to produce
therapeutics. Chlorogen,
a relatively new start-up, is based in St. Louis, MO, and has a
staff of about a dozen employees. Their primary product, as their
first entry into the biologics market, is human serum albumin (HSA).
HSA is used for blood volume replacement in medical situations involving
severe burns, surgeries, and shock, and is  more
effective in these scenarios than cheaper, more available substitutes.
A non-therapeutic form is also used as a stabilizer in pharmaceutical
products and as a coating for medical devices. Chlorogen has demonstrated
that they can produce both forms of HSA using transgenic tobacco;
the company has produced several other proteins out of transgenic
tobacco as well. These proteins are the key ingredients in therapeutic
products that the company intends to produce and market and include:
a vaccine for cholera, treatment for liver diseases like hepatitis,
insulin-like growth factor to combat diabetes, and treatments for
cancer.
As compared to Chlorogen, Large
Scale Biology Corporation is larger and more established. It
advertises itself as “one of the world's leading companies
dedicated to the discovery, analysis, manufacture and commercialization
of proteins.” The company was founded in 1987 and is staffed
by over 130 employees in three locations (Headquarters and Genomics
Division in Vacaville, CA; Bioprocessing Division in Owensboro,
KY; Proteomics Division in Germantown, MD). Large Scale Biology
Corporation’s particular focus is on what they call “personalized
medicine” – a treatment regime for ailments such as
cancer in which genetic information obtained from the cancer cells
of an individual is used to tailor the medicine to that patient.
The company is currently evaluating the safety and efficacy of personalized
treatments for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer affecting
the immune system, which is diagnosed in as many as 50,000 Americans
annually. In addition to their personalized cancer therapies, Large
Scale Biology Corporation is producing tobacco-derived treatments
for less-common, yet debilitating illnesses, such as Fabry’s
disease, which can cost an individual upwards of $150,000 annually
to treat. The company is also working to produce a variety of therapeutic
antibodies.
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