EU-funded SmartCell to use plant cells as pharmaceutical factories

SmartCell, an EU-funded project, has been awarded EUR 6 million to develop tools to synthesise valuable pharmaceutical products using plant cells. The project is a consortium of 14 leading European research institutes, 2 small- and medium-sized enterprises (PAT SA) and 2 major industrial enterprises and has a total budget of EUR 8.5 million over the next 4 years.

Plants sustainably produce low levels of secondary metabolites of high industrial value. However, they are often too complex to be economically manufactured by chemical synthesis. Advanced metabolic engineering and exploitation of plants as Green Factories has been prevented due to poorly understood metabolic pathways in plants and the regulation thereof.

SmartCell brings together 14 leading European academic laboratories and four industrial partners in order to create a novel concept for rationally engineering plants towards improved economical production of high-value compounds for non-food industrial and pharmaceutical use. Although SmartCell focuses on terpenoids i.e. the largest class of secondary metabolites, which exhibit extremely diverse biological and pharmaceutical activities, all knowledge, tools and resources developed in the project, are generic and broadly applicable to engineer any plant biosynthetic pathway. A systems biology approach using metabolomics and transcriptomics is taken to move beyond the state of the art. New multi-gene transfer technologies are developed. By screening and functionally categorizing genes at structural, regulatory and transport levels a comprehensive knowledge base of how secondary metabolite biosynthetic pathways operate in plants is developed.

The case study component i.e. manufacturing a valuable terpenoid in an optimized large-scale system gives SmartCell a unique opportunity to directly make the transition from fundamental science to application. For long-term exploitation an integrated database and a genebank available for academic and industrial communities are established. SmartCell provides new opportunities for SMEs and established European biotech companies, and the technology can also be transferred to other non-food related industries e.g. fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries. SmartCell proves that plant-based resources can furnish the European society and industry far more than they presently do.

For more information, please visit:
European Commission > Research > Biosociety > News & Events > News:SmartCell

Online on 12/12//2008