Molecular farming
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Molecular farming is a frontier technology that allows the production of proteins with plants instead of animals. Plants are modified so that their cells replicate the desired proteins and are then harvested from the leaves or other plant tissue. Molecular farming has mostly been used in the pharmaceutical space (from vaccines to antibodies), but it's now also being targeted at food protein production to shift away from carbon and land-intensive animal products. Precision fermentation and molecular farming are quite similar technologies, with the main difference being that the former engineers microorganisms to ferment the target protein, while the latter engineers plants to express the protein and then harvest it. Molecular farming could potentially be scaled to the open field (while today still at the lab level), while precision fermentation needs bioreactors. We mapped 40+ molecular farming startups active from alternative protein to pharma.