Third World countries, including the Philippines, where the level of acceptance of agricultural biotechnology is reportedly better than its other Asian neighbors, should take advantage of their respective environment conducive for the looming “bioindustrial revolution.”

This involves the so-called molecular farming or plant factories, which is described as an emerging new paradigm in the biotechnological arena today as an offshot of the recent scientific achievements in the fields of physics and chemistry in the industrial age of the 21st century.

“Today in the ‘biotech century,’ we don’t need large amounts of financial capital, especially in the developing countries. All we have to do is take advantage of what we have in ample,” said Eufemio Rasco, a professor at the University of the Philippines in Mindanao and author of a new book, The Unfolding Gene Revolution: The Ideology, Science and Regulation of Plant Biotechnology.

Rasco gave the keynote address in the two-day 34th annual convention of the Philippine Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology held at the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) in Muñoz Science City on November 29 and 30.

He also launched his book, published by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications and the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture about the so-called gene revolution.

He observed that the new technological paradigm, essentially a fusion of biology and information technology, gives poor countries an opportunity to catch up with what the richer nations had attained from agricultural-based industrialization.

“Unlike the industrial era, the biotech century does not require large amounts of financial capital that the poor does not have. It only requires biological materials and a favorable environment that the tropics, where the poor countries are located, are naturally endowed with,” Rasco said.

He added that the Philippines is ideal for “molecular farming” or “biofactories” not only because of its favorable setting but also for the level of acceptance of biotechnology, which is better than China and India.

“Here we eat our biotech products. It is only in the Philippines where we grow food, orchid and other high value crops through biotechnology. In other Asian countries like China and India, which are engaged in biotech alongside the Philippines, they only produce pharmaceuticals and other products by means of biotechnology,” Rasco said.

He said that it was about time for the Philippine agriculture scientists should focus on “molecular farming” to produce local drugs and vaccine.

“In the biotech century, microorganisms, plants and animals will continue to produce better quality traditional products such as food, feed, fiber and ornamentals in a sustainable manner using novel production systems that are not land-intensive. There are nontraditional products and novel processes now also under development,” he emphasized in his presentation.

These include “bioenergy” and pharmaceuticals, therapeutic proteins and vaccines. Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants, mosses, and algae, have the advantage of flexibility, efficiency and safety, he said.

He quoted the European Union Framework and Pharma-Planta Consortium, said to have introduced innovations on “biopharming”, as saying that: “Molecular farming is reaching the stage at which it could challenge established production technologies that use bacteria, yeast and cultured mammalian cells.”

He said the same challenge is posed before local plant scientists more so that there is an economic incentive awaiting for them, such as $30-billion market.

Rasco cited the advantages of plants in biotechnological endeavors as source of drugs and vaccines, among others. It is better than bacteria for it can perform posttranslational modification of proteins. It can produce proteins that bacteria cannot.

It is better than animal than in being cheaper, safer and easily scalable. ”And it can be used directly without extraction and purification as in edible vaccine,” he continued.

In fact, Rasco said, there had already been certain significant breakthroughs in the field of molecular farming,” like the 1997 finding that biotech corn has avidin, the glycoprotein in the egg albumen. Avidin in the seed, he said, can be stored for a long time.

The other products approved by the US Agriculture department in January 2007 for molecular farming include trypcin-produced by Sigma-Aldrich, a pharmaceutical group, in 2004 from biotech corn and a vaccine against Newcastle virus of chicken produced from tobacco cell culture by Dow in January.

Out for the market soon is the insulin produced from oilbodies of safflower seeds. Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) as a “thistlelike” herb endemic in cool-temperature
countries about three feet high with spiny heads or orange-red flowers. Europeans used to extract oil from Safflower for food flavoring and coloring, it was said.

Safflower insulin, which reportedly passed the equivalence test in January 2007, has a promising market of 16,000 kilograms by 2012 owing to the growing number of diabetic people.

Safflower insulin can reduce capital cost in the traditional production process by 70 percent and product cost by some 40 percent over the current system, it was said. It has a $11-billion potential market.

The UP science professor enumerated the possible areas of active research for molecular farming, which included a plastid transformation-involving high level accumulation of foreign protein and transgene stacking, root culture and plant-cell culture.
The other potential areas of molecular farming are mosses and microalgae. Molecular farming of mosses combines the advantages of microorganisms and higher plants; its production in bioreactor does away with the usual regulatory problems; it can produce recombinant DNA cheaper than higher plants. ”Besides,” added Rasco, “the N-glycvosylation problems with higher plants can be mitigated by targeting the mosses”

The advantages of algae molecular farming, on the other hand, are it has shorter production time compared to higher plants, some of their species like Chlorella and Dunaliella, grow in saline water and, thus will not compete with land grown crops.

Some of their species do not produce toxins. They require simple bioreactor design because algae are photoautotrophs, meaning they produce their own food by the aid of natural light.

Rasco also noted the growing number of governments engaged in biofuel research and applications being part of molecular farming.

A recent study showed that there was an increase in venture funding for biofuel endeavors from $30 million in 2005 to $275 million in 2006.

“There are many areas of concentration and potentials for biofarming , or plant factories, in the Philippines . The government has only to identify what regulations are needed on the issue of biosafety. On the other hand, the private sector has only to tap local talents to exploit the exciting possibilities of molecular farming. It is for the researchers to explore,” Rasco said.