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THE OBSERVER | Saturday, December 06, 2008 BUSINESS | 19
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Molecular farming targets magic bullets
New companies
forming in the current
economic environment
are rare,
but here’s one:
Plantform. It’s a
biotechnology enterprise,
emerging
after years of research
which have
established Guelph and Plantform’s
co-founder, University of Guelph environmental
biologist Prof. Chris Hall
and his research group, as leaders in
molecular farming.
Hall described the fledgling venture
as part of a presentation he made last
month at the university for the News@
Noon newsmaker series, sponsored
by the University of Guelph/Ontario
Ministry of Agriculture, Food and
Rural Affairs partnership. It’s a testament
to how far he’s come in the past
decade that he’s been putting diseasefighting
antibodies into plants, part of
that time as the prestigious Canada
Research Chair in Recombinant Antibody
Technology.
Antibodies, says Hall, are magic bullets.
They’re the defense mechanisms
the animal world naturally mounts
when an infectious agent enters the
body. When they’re introduced through
biotechnology into the plant’s genetic
code, the plant will go on to produce
seed with the antibodies. Later, grown
plants can be harvested and the antibodies
extracted.
In these plants, antibodies are relatively
easy to find, because they don’t
occur there naturally. Hall’s been us-
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ing tobacco for his studies, because
it’s a non-food plant, and compared to
most North American plants, its leaves
are huge, so it generates significant
biomass. That means he can harvest
more antibodies per plant.
And those antibodies are needed now.
A treatment for one type of breast cancer
is a commercial antibody-based
drug, administered to as many as
10,000 Canadians annually. It’s expensive
– more than $30,000 for a year’s
treatment – and Hall believes a generic
version of this antibody could be created
much more affordably, in plants.
Indeed, his research group has already
produced small quantities in tobacco.
Now, they’re testing it to make sure it
behaves the same way as the commercial
version, and to decide whether it
goes on to clinical trials.
Antibodies have many other uses,
too. And that’s where Hall’s Ontario
Agricultural College training comes
in – antibodies can also be left in plants
to give them resistance to certain environmental
contaminants.
For example, some 17 students and
technicians in Hall’s laboratory are
working with him on a way to give
greenhouse plants resistance to a
pesky blight- and rot fungus called
Pythium aphanidermatum. It spreads
quickly by spores, and currently has
no effective control. The antibody
they’re working towards would help
plants put up resistance to infection
caused by the spores of the fungus.
Another use being developed in Hall’s
laboratory is bioactive paper, in which
the harvested antibodies can be bound
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to paper as a coating, to capture disease-causing
agents called pathogens.
Pathogens that come in contact with
the antibody on the paper would be
captured, and then taken out of commission.
Hall envisions filters can be
made from this antibody-based paper
to remove pathogens from water in
home applications, as well as largescale
city water facilities.
In fact, Hall believes all kinds of products
are possible with this antibodybased
paper – protective clothing, air
filters, face masks, food packaging and
biohazard detection, just to name a
few.
A company’s start-up costs for this
kind of antibody technology is signifi-
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cant. But after that, Hall says, production
costs are low, less than a few dollars
per gram. He’s certain they’ll be
needed – in fact, he’s predicting a capacity
crunch. But the process needs
streamlining to extract the antibodies
in pure form from tobacco, and new
technology must be developed to make
purification from plants efficient and
affordable.
That’s where Plantform comes in.
Hall hopes it’s an answer to not only
the production of inexpensive antibodies,
but also to the purification
problems associated with getting the
antibodies out of plants.
We can hope he’s right, and that his
magic bullet is not far away.
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