Abstract
Plant-made biopharmaceuticals have long been considered a promising technology for providing inexpensive and efficacious medicines for developing countries, as well as for combating pandemic infectious diseases and for use in personalized medicine. Plant virus expression vectors produce high levels of pharmaceutical proteins within a very short time period. Recently, plant viruses have been employed as nanoparticles for novel forms of cancer treatment. This review provides a glimpse into the development of plant virus expression systems both for pharmaceutical production as well as for immunotherapy.
Highlights
Plant-derived biopharmaceuticals, including vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and other therapeutic proteins, are rapidly emerging into the marketplace
This review aims to describe some of the virus expression systems currently in use and explore some of their most recent applications, both as production systems and as nanoparticles for cancer immunotherapy
First generation virus expression vectors are based on a full virus strategy and contain the entire virus genome, with the foreign gene of interest expressed from the same open reading frame as the coat protein, either as part of a fusion protein or else separately from an additional strong subgenomic promoter that is incorporated into the viral genome
Summary
Plant-derived biopharmaceuticals, including vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and other therapeutic proteins, are rapidly emerging into the marketplace. They are easy to generate en masse and can be stored at ambient temperatures [1] These attributes make plant-derived biopharmaceuticals attractive alternatives for providing medicines that were previously inaccessible to poor developing countries. While this longstanding goal has yet to be realized, plant-derived vaccines and other pharmaceuticals have found additional applications. Plant virus nanoparticles can even be engineered to carry a drug payload to cancer cells, offering a new and potent arsenal for cancer researchers and physicians alike [5] With this history, the development of plant virus expression vectors for biopharmaceutical development has become a powerful tool.
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