Biobased production of complex plant-derived pharmaceuticals using advanced pathway engineering
Janos Bindics and Johannes Buyel of the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology ( ACIB ) and BOKU University describe their plant-cell based solution to produce plant-derived pharmaceuticals
Medicinal plants have been used for millennia and , aided by modern science , remain the source of highvalue pharmaceutical products . 1 Plant-derived pharmaceuticals represent a huge market , estimated at $ 6 billion / year for the compounds discussed in this article alone . 2,3 The WHO defines many plant-derived pharmaceuticals as essential to meeting basic health needs . 4
Whereas chemical synthesis can be suitable for simple phytochemicals and help to design semi-synthetic derivatives , production in plants can be advantageous in the case of complex compounds . Specifically , production can rely on conventional agricultural methods or cutting-edge biobased processes
We selected the antimalarial antibiotic artemisinin , its synthetic analogue chloroquine and the potent anticancer compound paclitaxel ( Figure 1 ) to exemplify the manufacturing options and to discuss benefits and drawbacks .
Traditional production methods
Despite advances in biotechnology , many plant-derived pharmaceuticals rely on industrial-scale cultivation of the host plant as raw material . The relatively low concentration of the active compound ( typically a few g / kg ) imposes several production challenges :
• Dependence on industrialscale agriculture
• Costly downstream processing to enrich the active compound
Figure 1 – Chemical structure of essential , plant-derived pharmaceuticals : artemisinin ( 1 ), chloroquine ( 2 ) & paclitaxel ( 3 )
70 SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE ESTABLISHED 1981