Therapeutic agents, scale

Nickel carbonyl should be used in totally enclosed systems or under good local exhaust. Plants and laboratories where nickel carbonyl is used should make use of air-monitoring devices, alarms should be present in case of accidental leakage, and appropriate personal respiratory protective devices should be readily available for emergency uses. Monitoring of urinary nickel levels is useful to help determine the severity of exposure and identify appropriate treatment measures. Some large-scale users of nickel carbonyl maintain a supply of sodium diethyldithiocarbamate, or Antabuse, a therapeutic agent, on hand for use in case of overexposure. 

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. 

Pravastatin, a 3-hydroxy-3-methyl glutaryl CoA reductase inhibitor applied as a therapeutic agent for hypercholesterolemia, can be synthesized by stereo- and regioselective hydroxylation of compactin by the soil microorganism Streptomyces sp. Y-110 (Fig. 22) [152]. The fermentative production of pravastatin has already been applied on an industrial scale by Sankyo Co. using different Streptomyces bacteria strains [153, 154]. 

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