Plant Expression System

Plants offer a unique combination of advantages for the production of pharmaceutical antibodies. Creative Biolabs has developed advanced and tailored antibody expression platform based on tobacco (Nicotiana benthamiana) to produce high yields of therapeutic antibodies.

Plants are one of the world's most cost-effective protein producers. Plant systems for the production of antibodies have numerous of clear advantages such as appropriate post-translational modifications, flexibility to rapidly scale up, reduced input costs, and absence of potential risks of contamination with human pathogens. Besides, microbial and animal cell cultures need fermentation bioreactors for protein production, but transgenic plants can accumulate proteins in their seeds or grains or leaves, which making cost much lower. As plant-based protein expression system has so many benefits, greenhouse-based manufacturing facilities have been more and more important in building rapid and economic scale-up protein expression systems in order to meet market demands. A wide range of pharmaceutical antibodies have been expressed in plants, including full-size antibodies, various functional antibody derivatives like Fab fragments, scFvs, bispecific scFvs, single domain antibodies and antibody fusion proteins.

Tobacco Expression System

The leaves of tobacco (Nicotiana benthamiana) are well suited for producing recombinant antibodies in a non-permanent fashion. The broad knowledge of its genetic information and extensive experience on tobacco cultivation makes it suitable for transgenosis system. Moreover, as N. benthamiana is susceptible to a large variety of plant-pathogenic agents, such as TMV, CMV and Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which makes it well suitable for rapid incorporate of foreign genes and successfully produce Abs on a large scale.

Figure 1. Schematic overview of the transient expression using pEAQ vectors. (Marsian et al. 2016)

Creative Biolabs' plant antibody expression system is a rapid, flexible, high yielding system for antibody expression. The advantages of our platform are:

• Rapid. Transient protein expression in plant leaves can be initiated within less than three weeks from the identification of the antibody sequence.
• Low production costs. As plant cells do not require very specific temperature, pH and oxygen levels, our protein expression system does not use highly complex, expensive, stainless steel bioreactors typically used in mammalian cell-based production systems to maintain strict conditions. This largely reduces overall costs.
• Safety. Plant expression system offers substantial advantages such as the absence of mammalian pathogens in the production process.
• Broad range of expression capabilities. Able to produce various full-size antibodies and functional antibody derivatives.

Our well-developed plant expression system is a valuable tool for the expression of complex antibodies. For more detailed information, please feel free to contact us or directly sent us an inquiry.

References

1. Marsian J and Lomonossoff G P (2016). Molecular pharming - VLPs made in plants. Curr Opion Biotech 37: 201-206.
2. Fischer R, Twyman R M and Schillberg S (2003). “Production of antibodies in plants and their use for global health.” Vaccine 21: 820–825.

For Research Use Only.