Silkworm as a Biofactory Insect: A Critical Narrative Review of Recombinant Production Platforms, Product Quality and Translational Readiness

Le résumé fourni par la source

The domesticated silkworm, Bombyx mori, has moved from a sericultural resource to an engineered production host for recombinant proteins, virus-like particles, functional silk, and, more recently, heterologous biosynthetic products. Its appeal is biologically distinctive: larvae and pupae support B. mori nucleopolyhedrovirus-based transient expression, whereas the exceptionally secretory silk gland can be genetically reprogrammed to deposit recombinant products into a cocoon that also functions as a dry storage matrix. This critical narrative review evaluates the silkworm as a biofactory by integrating evidence on transient baculovirus systems, stable transgenic silk-gland platforms, emerging silkworm cell lines, host and vector engineering, post-translational processing, downstream purification, representative product classes, scale-up and translational readiness. The evidence indicates that silkworm systems can produce structurally complex and biologically active proteins, multicomponent virus-like particles and engineered silk-associated products at experimentally useful to pilot-relevant scales. The strongest advantages are not universal low cost or intrinsically human-like processing, but the availability of several biologically different production architectures, high secretory capacity in specialised tissues and the possibility of coupling synthesis with cocoon-based capture and storage. Important constraints remain. Glycan composition is platform- and tissue-dependent, baculovirus infection can intensify proteolysis and host contamination, high recombinant load can perturb silk-gland physiology, and downstream recovery can dominate practical manufacturability. Recent batch-scale antibody production and glycan-remodelled lysosomal enzyme studies materially strengthen the translational case, while new high-proliferation silkworm cells may narrow the divide between whole-insect and conventional insect-cell manufacturing. Nevertheless, evidence for current good manufacturing practice reproducibility, comprehensive comparability, regulatory control and techno-economic superiority remains limited. Future development should therefore be product-led: cargo properties, critical quality attributes, tissue environment, processing capacity and purification route should determine the choice of silkworm chassis. On this basis, B. mori is best understood not as a single substitute for established expression hosts, but as a configurable insect biomanufacturing platform whose value is greatest when its biology is matched deliberately to the product.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.