VPB 321: Animal Biotechnology (2+1)

NEED FOR BIOPHARMING

• Many pharmaceutical drugs have been produced in sterile fermenters by mammalian cells or using genetically engineered microorganisms. As the construction of huge fermentation plants incurs huge capital cost, the production costs also very high.
• Another method of production of biopharmaceuticals is to extract it from animal and human tissues such as insulin from pit and cow pancreas or blood proteins from human blood. But these procedures carry the risk of transmitting infectious diseases to humans.
• As there is advance in the techniques of manipulating the plant genome over the past twenty years, plants can be used to produce a wide range of important proteins.
• It is hoped that this will result in therapeutic products at a price significantly cheaper than through current methods of production.