subject: Biotechnological Plants-Highly Efficient in Meeting Pharmaceutical Challenges [print this page] Biotechnological Plants-Highly Efficient in Meeting Pharmaceutical Challenges
Medicines are made of harmful chemicals and components extracted from animal origin. But it could be very fatal and full of side effects. Hence, Biotechnology has developed genetically engineered plants that contains healing capacities and can cure crucial diseases without any side-effects. These plants are used to develop medicines in biotechnological plants.
Since long, living organisms like yeasts and bacterias have been utilized as the resources for development of pharmaceuticals. These resources are not sufficient to meet the growing requirements. Therefore to solve this problem, now plants are used as alternatives to animal resources. Several pharmacy plants have already been cultured in numerous countries and are at their development stages. Soya, tobacco, oilseed and maize are some of the pharmacy crops which have been used for trial.
Biotechnological plants have enormous capacity to manufacture pharmaceutical products like blood-clotting proteins, vaccines, antibodies, growth hormones, structural substances including collagen, anti-viral, antimicrobial and various enzymes. However, these plants focus more on production of antibodies and therapeutic proteins from genetically engineered plants. These salutary proteins are used in the treatment of many lethal diseases like cancer, leukemia, immunity disorders and several infections.
The use of genetically altered plants in biotechnological plants offers several advantages. They are capable of meeting the huge demand of pharmaceuticals in the market. Also the medicines produced by them are cost-effective that can be affordable by everyone. They involve flexible and easy methods of production. The additional benefit these plants get is that the cell structure of plants is very similar to animals.
However, the agriculture of pharmacy plants introduces various safety challenges. Genetically engineered plants can mix with the food crops and other eatables and can be very dangerous. Hence, numerous safety measures are taken into account and augmented use of non-food crops to decrease the risks is well practiced in medicine manufacturing plants of these biopharmaceuticals.
