Molecular Farming of Medicines: A Field of Growing Promise

Abstract

Man has been using plants as a source of medicines for millennia. From the earliest stages of civilization, herbs and plant extracts have been sought that ease suffering and cure disease. In the last half of the twentieth century, molecular biology research has identified many molecular medicines that can treat illness, such as recombinant antibodies, vaccines and growth hormones. Widespread use of molecular medicines has been hampered by the difficulty in producing them outside animals or animal cells, making them expensive and in short supply. In the 1990s, the fusion of molecular medicine and plant biotechnology showed that many molecular medicines or vaccines could be grown in plants. This new field is called ‘molecular farming’, and the molecular medicines made in plants are safer, easier to produce and less expensive than those produced in animals or microbes. Molecular farming is already being used to grow new cash crops rich in molecular medicines and it will have a profound impact on the economics of both agriculture and the pharmaceutical industry. Through modern technology, science has once again made plants a source of new medicines, albeit molecular ones tailored to treat the diseases of the twenty-first century. The farmers of the future could be growing crops to provide the medicines that governments and pharmaceutical companies require.