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Every six weeks, she made a 45-minute drive to a hospital
outpatient center. There, she’d check in, get her vitals
taken, and sit in a reclining chair while nurses inserted an
IV and monitored her for adverse reactions over the next
two hours.

Each infusion was a production:

• Lost teaching hours.
• Care coordination hassles.
• Insurance authorizations and copay juggling.
• A looming anxiety that her body might one day
mount antibodies against the drug—rendering it
useless.

She measured her life in infusion intervals. She learned to
hold her breath before bloodwork, praying her CRP levels
hadn’t crept up. She learned to smile through side effects.
She learned that biologics, while powerful, could be as
disempowering as the disease itself.

The Turning Point: A Clinical Trial in Edible
Immunology

Then one day, her GI—new to the practice, research-
savvy—offered her something different: a spot in a clinical
trial for an oral anti-TNF biologic.

But this wasn’t a synthetic pill or a new injectable.
It was a biologic grown in lettuce.

The therapy used transplastomic plant expression: a
human-compatible anti-TNF antibody was encoded into the
chloroplast genome of lettuce. After harvest, the leaves

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