Advances in immunology, molecular biology, and plant biotechnology have changed the paradigm of plant as a food source to so called 'plant bioreactor' to produce valuable recombinant proteins, such as therapeutic or diagnostic monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, and other biopharmaceutical proteins (Fig. 1). Plants as bioreactors for the production of therapeutic proteins have several 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. Thus, plants are considered to be a potential alternative way to compete with conventional systems such as bacteria, yeast, or insect and mammalian cell culture. Rabies virus epidemics remain still problematic throughout the world, and adequate treatment has been hampered by the worldwide shortage and high cost of prophylactic antibodies. Recent demand of anti-cancer antibodies for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes is increasing. In 2010, antibody market will increase up to more than US$13 billion. Thus, transgenic plant production systems which enable high production levels of therapeutic antibodies are very attractive to pharmaceutical companies who want to produce antibodies in demand. Currently, I have successfully developed plant system for production of anti-rabies monoclonal antibody and anti-colorectal cancer monoclonal antibody. The effective plant production system for recombinant antibodies or vaccines requires the appropriate plant expression machinery with optimal combination of transgene expression regulatory elements, control of post-translational protein processing, and efficient purification methods for product recovery. Therefore, my research program is focused on these topics. The fundamental goal of my research is development of economically feasible plant expression system to produce monoclonal antibodies and vaccines by using plant biotechnology tools to optimize the expression conditions and to tune up the quality of therapeutic proteins.
My main research topics are as follows:
1) Plant production of monoclonal antibodies against cancers and emerging infectious diseases including bio-terrorism agents
2) Development of fruit-based vaccines against infectious diseases
3) Study of modification of glycosylation of glycoproteins expressed in transgenic plants to increase their therapeutic activities (Fig. 3)
1) Plant production of monoclonal antibodies against cancers and emerging infectious diseases including bio-terrorism agents
2) Development of fruit-based vaccines against infectious diseases
3) Study of modification of glycosylation of glycoproteins expressed in transgenic plants to increase their therapeutic activities (Fig. 3)
Fig. 3. Humanization of N-glycosylation.
Keywords
Plant biotechnology; Immunology; Monoclonal antibody; Plant-based vaccine
