Our system will work with the antibodies that are generated against any disease.
HIV, Ebola, Influenza... essentially any antibody we'll be able to make. This is
our factory. A leaf!
Well I've always been fascinated by plants.
I grew up on a farm near the Wisconsin Illinois state line. My dad was in the farming business.
He owned a seed company. As a kid I wondered how plants interact with their
environment...What are the the chemical cues between plants and the environment?
Plants and pathogens? Plants and microorganisms that live on their leaves?
We're an agricultural biotechnology company based in Middleton, Wisconsin.
We produce proteins and antibodies on plants. And it essentially it could be a
whole new way of pharmaceutical production.
I'm Ryan Shepherd, co-founder and CEO of PhylloTech. This is my company.
We're hoping we're gonna change the world.
Plants are the primary protein production system on earth. All those leaves!
It's an incredible amount of leaf surface area. It's an untapped reservoir of protein
production potential.
So back in graduate school my advisor and I found that plants
secrete proteins. Nobody really knew that before. And it was that concept that led
to the foundation of our company, and the whole idea of engineering plants to both
produce and secrete proteins to leaf surfaces. So you see these little leaf
hairs? That's what's manufacturing the protein
for us. Those are trichome glands and they're hard to see but they cover the
entire plant. And so we wondered could we engineer tobacco trichome glands to
secrete other things to leaf aerial surfaces? And so we started to engineer
the gland to secrete proteins.
When Ryan came to us the technology was in a very
early stage of development. Too early for venture or other private investment to
really be interested in funding it. We really hoped that this had great
potential and wanted to provide the funding to
actually get that first proof of concept data for this platform.
So Ryan and I are brothers and ever since we were little kids, we talked about starting a company together
and with the help from the National Science Foundation we did!
I'm Colin Shepherd, co-founder and chief operating officer of PhylloTech.
So what we're going to do here is we're gonna take the gene that makes the
product we want. We're going to put that into a bacterium and then the bacteria
will infect the tobacco. And the tobacco will make the product we want on the
leaf surface. So the DNA is already in here.
So all of these plants have been infected with bacteria. And when they're big enough, we take them to the grow room.
The purple light is a specific wavelength that's optimized for plant growth.
We wash the leaves in water. The proteins come right off.
We freeze the solution. Put the ice chunks in flasks and then freeze dry them.
And in the end, this is our product: Pure protein
So in 2015, NSF released a Dear Colleague letter for new ways of producing
therapeutics that could be utilized in the Ebola outbreak. And we thought, hey,
this could really be a good way for us to use our system to help people.
Our system could really make an impact in this area!
At NSF we are looking for technologies that are going to have a big impact, that are
disruptive technologies potentially and those that are really game-changing technologies
for the industry. Ryan's technology really fit all of that.
So we engineered tobacco trichomes to secrete one of the
antibodies that is effective against Ebola. We can also create biopesticides,
environmentally-friendly methods of pathogen control. Once engineered,
once the plants are generated the trichomes continuously secrete protein
to leaf surfaces. There's no stainless steel refineries.
It's environmentally friendly. The inputs are only light, water and fertilizer.
We recover proteins from leaf surfaces that are almost a hundred percent pure.
The only limitation is how many plants can you grow? There's still some challenges
that we need to overcome. Right now, we're using NSF funding to overcome some of
these challenges. We're working on products that can truly benefit the
world and that's what keeps me going