Tobacco promising "factory" for biopharmaceuticals.

2004 SEP 1 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- The economics of producing biopharmaceuticals from transgenic plants such as tobacco is still a roadblock to producing large quantities of urgently needed medicines, especially for people in underdeveloped nations.

Chenming (Mike) Zhang is testing a variety of ways to economically recover recombinant proteins from transgenic tobacco using different protein separation techniques.

Zhang, an assistant professor in the department of biological systems engineering (BSE) in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, is working with a team of three PhD students to develop transgenic tobacco plants able to express recombinant proteins economically. Recombinant proteins are potential therapeutic agents for treating human and animal diseases and creating new vaccines. Plant-made vaccines are especially beneficial because plants are free of human diseases, reducing the cost to screen for viruses and bacterial toxins.

"Recombinant protein production from transgenic plants is challenging, not just from the molecular biology aspect of creating high-expression plant lines, but also from the engineering aspect of recovering and purifying the proteins economically - the importance of which cannot be overlooked," Zhang said.

Recombinant proteins are proteins expressed by a host other than their native hosts. For example, if the gene for human growth hormone is inserted into the genetic code of yeast (gene recombination), then the corresponding protein expressed in the yeast is called recombinant human ...