Talk:Humanized antibody
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Once the humanized antibody gene is available, wouldn't the Virginia Tech process known as MEGAPHARM developed by Professor Carol Cramer allow it to be produced inexpensively in tobacco plants?
Croptech went bankrupt before they finished demonstrating the effectiveness of MegaPharm but perhaps you are in the right place to use the IP involved. They had a way to make human pharmaceuticals in tobacco plants. Tobacco phosphorylates proteins more like people do than like bacteria do.
MEchanical Gene Activation Post HARvest Manufacturing
They have a promoter that takes effect when the tobacco plant suffers severe damage. Not from a mere insect nibbling on a leaf somewhere, or even when the plant is chopped off at the ground, but rather when the plant is shredded as if to make cigarettes.
They use an address on the front of the protein being produced which says "excrete me".
Thus the novel product DOES NOT get made in the field, but only in the shredding shed. After shredding, you put the pile of tobacco in the corner to madly produce the desired protein in the next 24 to 48 hours as the cells are dying. When you wash the product out of the tobacco, it is already as pure as if it had been produced in bacterial vats and gone through five or six stages of purification.
They harvest when the plant is about a foot high since then it has all the cells it will have. This means that you can get several densely grown crops per year. You may even be able to regrow from the roots once or twice.
When you have one plant with the correct gene insertion accomplished, you can get a million seeds from it and have a whole field growing in the very next crop cycle. This is vastly faster and cheaper than the creation of a bacterial vat facility.
The expert I know is Carol Cramer at a university in Arkansas if I have it right.
