Advances in molecular farming: key technologies, scaled up production and lead targets

摘要

The ???eld of molecular farming has experienced something of a rollercoaster ride since its inception two and a half decades ago. Realization of the potential for molecular farming followed quickly after the development of technologies in the 1980s to introduce recombinant DNA into plants, with a patent application describing edible vaccines (Curtiss and Cardineau, 1988), and the literature describing the potential for plant-produced antibodies and vaccines (Haq et al., 1995; Hiatt et al., 1989; Usha et al., 1993). The development and re???nement of expression technologies for transgenic and transient systems, along with application of these approaches to a wide variety of target molecules produced in a range of model and crop species, were re???ected in a ???urry of literature and patents over the next decade. Early reports were followed by technology and product development efforts in established agricultural biotechnology companies and newly founded companies focused on molecular farming, with some lead candidates entering early phase clinical trials, recalled in this issue by Arntzen (2015). In parallel, the ???rst patent on chloroplast genetic engineering (Daniell and McFadden, 1988) demonstrated the systema??s potential advantages for high-level leaf-based expression and transgene containment via maternal inheritance, with the ???rst vaccine antigen expressed over a decade later (Daniell et al., 2001).