earticle

영어

Therapeutic proteins can prevent or treat wide ranges of diseases from cancer and viral or bacterial infections. Plants have advantages which include the lack of animal pathogenic contaminants, low cost of production, and ease of agricultural scale-up compared to other currently available systems. However, plants are not ideal expression systems for the production of biopharmaceutical proteins, due to incapability of the authentic human N-glycosylation process. The majority of therapeutic proteins are glycoproteins which harbor N-glycans, which are often essential for their stability, folding, and biological activity. Thus, the effective plant production system for recombinant therapeutics requires the appropriate plant expression machinery with optimal combination of transgene expression regulatory conditions such as control of transcriptional and post transcriptional events. We are interested in developing a plant system to express a large amount of therapeutic proteins in plant cells using so called cell-reprogramming and several glyco-engineering strategies in plants, particularly including glycoprotein subcellular targeting, inhibition of plant specific glycosyltranferases and addition of human specific glycosyltransferases. Among the variety of available heterologous expression systems, the baculovirus-based insect cell expression system also has been utilized frequently for the high-level production of therapeutic recombinant proteins and harbors glycosylation processing pathways, which constitute an advantage over other prokaryotic systems that lack glycosylation. Currently, we have successfully developed both plant and insect expression systems for production of monoclonal antibodies for immunotherapy.