As part of our project, we decided that it would be interesting to see how many of plants it would require to give a single treatment to a person with severe Graves disease/ophthalmopathy, and how many to treat a less-severely affected patient. Initially we attempted to model this using data from <i> N. benthamiana </i> from various scientific papers that have used this as an expression system. In doing so, we created a simple equation that theoretically can be applied to any plant biofactory company, that ultimately calculates how many plants would be needed to create a single effective dose of medicine for a person with a disease/condition of interest. The benefit of this equation is that any one or all of the variables can be substituted to fit a new purpose, so that future teams/companies may be able to use this model and change or improve it, to estimate how many plants they would need to create a significant amount of product. To demonstrate this flexibility, we changed some of the variables ourselves and plotted some of the results gained from modelling using <a href="https://uk.mathworks.com/products/matlab.html">MatLab.</a>The variables we changed showed the potential production using different plant vectors/systems, specifically using <i> N. tabacum </i> cultivars TI-95, and I-64, and the newer 'HyperTrans' and PVX expression systems, which boast up to 30% of total soluble protein (TSP) being recombinant protein! Finally, we estimated the number of people in the US that suffer from Graves disease, calculated the mean severity of the disease, and then ran the model to estimate how many plants we would need to give every sufferer of Graves disease in the US a single dose of effective (90% reduction in TSI-created cAMP) treatment. The simple equation is shown directly below, with the breakdown of how we applied this equation using our own variables below that. At the bottom of this page or using this <a href="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2017/c/c7/T--Cardiff_Wales--Modelling_Extra_Material.pdf">link</a> , you can find a PDF of all the variables and statistics that were used to model our theoretical biofactory, with some tables showing the key information that we turned into graphs.

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