Therapeutic agents biopharmaceutical

The extraction and purification of proteins from organisms or biological tissue can be a laborious and expensive process, and often represents the principal reason why vaccines and other therapeutic agents reach costs that become unattainable for many. Downstream processing also can be a major obstacle with respect to cost for large-scale protein manufacturing in plants. However, purification from plant tissues, while still costly, is in general less expensive than purification from their mammalian and bacterial counterparts. Indeed, some plant-derived biopharmaceuticals, such as topically applied monoclonal antibodies, may require only partial purification and thus be even less intensive in terms of labor and cost. 

Biopharmaceuticals or biologicals are pharmaceutical products consisting of (glyco)proteins and/or nucleic acids that have evolved into a new and important category of therapeutic agents, in particular since the development of recombinant DNA technology. 

Another kind of biotechnological product that is acquiring interest as a therapeutic agent is the biopharmaceuticals derived from plants. As a result of the limited production capacity of many pharmaceutical products, the production in plants represents an innovative tool that can expand the yields of active principles because the large volume of biomass that can be developed at the fields. An extra advantage is that these products are free of human diseases and mammalian viral vectors. In products derived from bacteria, the bacterial endotoxin content of the... 

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