Protein Expression Systems: Why Soybean Seeds?

Abstract

The global protein therapeutics market is approaching $100 billion in annual sales. Furthermore, the in vitro diagnostic market, which relies heavily on the use of recombinant proteins as analyte specific reagents, is approaching $50 billion in annual sales. Increases in each market sector are estimated to be 8% to 20% per year for the next decade. Therefore, the costs of protein-based therapeutics and diagnostics will continue to be a significant percentage of health care expenses for patients and for agricultural animals and pets. A platform technology, which produces recombinant proteins at greatly reduced costs, provides inherent advantages, and allows low-tech sustainability of product lines, represents a competitive innovation which could create significant wealth in this industry. The use of soybean-derived proteins has the potential to provide such advantages. Since the use of recombinant proteins is widespread in human and animal therapeutics and diagnostics, there are thousands of potential applications for such a platform technology. While no one technology is optimal for the expression of every transgenic protein (Brondyk, 2009), the research that we have performed to date demonstrates the utility and feasibility of commercial applications for proteins made in transgenic soybean seeds. Soybean seeds expressing transgenic proteins represent a novel, sustainable platform technology which overcomes some of the current limitations for producing recombinant proteins for diagnostics, therapeutics, and industrial applications. Advantages include low cost of glycoslyated protein production, greenhouse containment, highest protein/biomass ratio, marketable formulations which require no purification from soy, safety, accurate dosing, low cost of protein purification, low-tech sustainability of product lines, reduced risk of contamination, ease of scalability, minimal waste produced, as well as being a green technology. To our knowledge, no other protein expression technology compares. Despite the fact that the present protein therapeutic and diagnostic markets are growing rapidly, some applications continue to be limited by the current technologies employed (Brondyk, 2009). For example the cost of production and purification of certain recombinant proteins makes their use in particular applications non-profitable. Some proteins cannot be expressed by any current technology and require expensive purification from human or animal tissues. A platform technology which could alleviate these concerns would create significant opportunities for novel product development, or expanded applications for existing products. In short, there is a need for alternative technologies for expressing and purifying recombinant proteins which can advance their applications. We propose that