Integrating molecular farming into sustainable plant biotechnology: a review of transgenic plants as biofactories for protein-based pharmaceutical production

Document Type

Article

Department

Faculty of Health Sciences, East Africa

Abstract

Molecular farming also known as Biopharming has emerged as a promising approach in biotechnology, particularly to produce pharmaceutical compounds. This paper explores the current state of molecular farming, highlighting recent advancements, challenges, and prospects. The Scopus database search was conducted to obtain all related studies on molecular farming until 2025. This article considers several advantages of plant-based systems against the microbial and mammalian cell cultures that are expensive, challenging to scale up and prone to pathogen invasion. Some molecular farming plant species: Nicotiana benthamiana, Oryza sativa, and Lactuca sativa, which serve as primary plant hosts for developing vaccines, producing therapeutic proteins and manufacturing industrial enzymes are described. Furthermore, the paper addresses the challenges of overviewing the regulatory barriers to plant-made pharmaceuticals, as well as the major ethical issues arising from the commercialization of the technology. The yield and quality of plant-derived biologics have improved substantially through methodological advancements, including transient expression, strategic promoter design, codon optimization, subcellular targeting and glycoengineering. This study shed light on the opportunities of molecular farming to change the current state of the pharmaceutical industry and meet the global demand for drugs via sustainable food system.

Publication (Name of Journal)

Plant Cell Tiss Organ Cult

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11240-025-03247-4

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