Biopharming

Biopharming - also called molecular pharming or molecular farming, a deliberate play on 'pharmaceutical' plus 'farming' - is the practice of genetically engineering transgenic plants specifically to manufacture pharmaceutical substances intended for human medical use. It is important not to confuse this with naturally occurring medicinal plants, which simply happen to produce compounds with therapeutic properties as part of their normal, unmodified biology; biopharmed plants, by contrast, have been deliberately re-engineered to manufacture a specific pharmaceutical product that they would never have produced naturally on their own. The underlying idea is to use an entire living plant, essentially, as a large-scale, self-replicating biological production system or 'bioreactor' - an approach that is gaining real significance within modern biotechnology because plant-based production can, in principle, scale more cheaply than conventional fermentation-based or cell-culture-based pharmaceutical manufacturing. Golden Rice, already covered in detail above, is cited as an ex …