Harnessing Plant-based Bioreactors for Sustainable Biopharmaceutical Production

Abstract

The biopharmaceutical industry has had some notable improvements considering the invention of plant based bioreactors, due to the view that it is a cheaper and more environmentally friendly method of therapeutic proteins production. Plant expression systems are most commonly used in technology to produce recombinant protein in plants, as hosts as opposed to mammalian or microbial hosts, have a number of benefits including lowcost, scale-up, and low-risk of human contagion. The paper engages in discourses about the possible use of plant-based bioreactors in manufacturing of biopharmaceutical products with an emphasis on its potential use in sustainable manufacturing. These advantages of plant based systems are discussed in view of the expanding global need to have biopharmaceutical products. The difficulties such as optimization of expression systems and regulatory issues as well as scale-up production are also deliberated. In addition there is also an overview of novel strategies that can be used to increase the efficiency of plant based bioreactors, in that; the techniques include genetic modification of plants and plant metabolic engineering. Using this gap analysis of the status quo of research and development, the paper presents the future potential of plant-based bioreactor in transforming the picture of biopharmaceutical production.