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• Access to therapies grown within their region—
customizable, traceable, and readily available.
• New roles in biologics oversight: coordinating
harvest cycles, managing local compounders, and
monitoring patient outcomes.

For public health:

• A new lever for equity: therapeutic production
aligned with local disease burden, local dietary
preferences, and local health priorities.
• Deployment in fragile settings, where centralized
manufacturing is infeasible.

This is not just innovation.
It’s sovereignty.
It’s resilience.
It’s the potential for health systems to grow their own
medicine.

A Case Study: Hemophilia Treatment in
Appalachia

Consider a rural health system in Appalachia. For years,
patients with hemophilia relied on intermittent access to
clotting factors—products that cost hundreds of thousands
of dollars annually, required refrigeration, and were only
available via specialty pharmacy delivery.

Then a pilot program introduced plant-expressed Factor
IX, engineered into lettuce and grown in AI-guided pods
just outside the clinic. The process was simple:

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