The First Drug Made by Genetically Modified Plants is Approved for Human Use by the FDA
Carrots are Good for You Your next biologic drug treatment could be grown in a carrot cell or some other plant-based biological factory. Kander via Wikimedia Big news on the pharma front today: for the first time the U.S. Federal Drug Administration has approved a drug for humans that was produced in a genetically engineered plant cell. The approval could open the door to a range of biologic drugs that are generated in plant cells and then transferred to human patients. The drug, called Elelyso, is a treatment for a disorder known as Gaucher disease that results from the lack of a specific enzyme. Engineers at Israeli biotech firm Protalix Biotherapeutics figured out how to grow this enzyme in carrot cells by inserting a specific gene into them that encodes for this human enzyme. In trials, subjects who received the "bio-pharmed" version of the enzyme showed improvement comparable to that of subjects...