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The majority of human pharmaceuticals including vaccine and therapeutic proteins are currently produced in mammalian and microbial cell cultures. However, these technology platforms cannot meet the increasing consumer demand due to requirements of heavy upfront capital investment and their limited scalability. Plants provide a viable alternative to these traditional technologies, allowing for cost effective, highly scalable, and safe production of recombinant proteins. Recent improvements in plant expression vectors have allowed for significant strides in a variety of new plant-based expression systems and their broad application. Meanwhile, these advances have shifted the pressure to the downstream process development. This review describes the principal plant production strategies, the latest plant expression systems, and focuses on currently produced proteins and their applications. In addition, we review new developments in the increasingly important area of downstream processing for purification of pharmaceutical proteins from plant materials.