[New role for tobacco--production of biopharmaceuticals].

Over one hundred of biopharmaceuticals present on the pharmaceutical market--among them mainly therapeutically peptides and proteins such as hormones, enzymes, interferons, blood factors, monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, growth factors and fusion proteins, are manufactured through recombinant DNA technology in cultures of transgenic bacterial (Escherichia coli), yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and mammalian cells (CHO, BHK) and rarely insect cells or insects (Bombyx mori). High costs of their manufacturing with simultaneous increased demand for existing and new biopharmaceuticals prompt for the search of cheaper methods of production by using transgenic domestic animals and, in particular, in transgenic crop plants. Among many plant species investigated for ability to produce biopharmaceuticals, such like cereals, legumes, oil plants, vegetables and fruit plants, aquatic plants and mosses, the outstanding features posses two tobacco species--Nicotiana tabacum and Nicotiana benthamiana. Foreign proteins can be expressed in those plants not only in nuclear genome, but also easily in chloroplast genome, through transient transformation and propagation of transgenic plant virus--e.g. tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). Tobacco was shown to be useful to produce various therapeutical proteins, even such complex ones as antibodies including secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA), with partial humanization of N-glycans. Especially important is possibility of rapid preparation, even within a week, vaccines and monoclonal antibodies for clinical tests or personalized anticancer therapy through transient transformation or infection with transgenic virus. Tobacco with foreign gene may be employed for manufacture in two ways--either in field or green-house cultivation or in the form of in vitro suspension cell culture. Among many biopharmaceuticals expressed in tobacco, several vaccines and antibodies are in advanced stages of development, in clinical evaluations and probably close to application in medicine.