Since long, Biopharmaceutical plants have been dealing with the manufacture of medicines especially salutary proteins from animal tissues. But the therapeutic proteins extracted from animal tissues cannot meet the growing requirements of medicines. And also these medicines have a lot of side-effects. Hence, alternatives for animal tissues are mandatory to be found out.

Latest techniques of Biotechnology have found out the alternatives for animal tissues. Therapeutic proteins can be obtained from plant sources also. Plants hold the potential for large-scale production of restorative proteins for pharmaceutical and industrial uses. The medicines developed are cost-effective also. Genetically engineered plants can be used to produce curative proteins such as blood product substitutes, mammalian antibodies, hormones, vaccines, cytokines and large number of other therapeutic proteins.

Biopharmaceutical plants use the concepts of Genomics. This needs proper host plant selection and gene expression system. The process of genomics mainly includes introduction of DNA of the target into the proper host plant. This in turn reproduces the target molecule during its growth. For recovery and purification process also, proteins are extracted from plant sources. According to the various reports, this production system is highly efficient and commercially attractive.

Pharmaceutical products developed from plant sources are at their initial stages of development. But according to several investigations, it has the potential to fight with the existing methods. It has additional benefits such as low investment cost, easy purification and recovery, safe production process and large scale production. Hence, Biopharmaceutical plants are focusing more and more on the use of botanical sources instead of animal sources.