Abstract：Plants have been used for human medicine for many centuries and account for about one fourth of present prescription drugs. Advances in modern biotechnology have further extended the potentials and applications of plants for human medicine development. Many important recombinant pharmaceutical proteins have been successfully expressed in plants and some of them are even in the commercial pipeline. Among several production strategies, chloroplast engineering offers a number of unique advantages including high-efficiency and stable expression, multi-gene expression in single transformation event, environment-friendliness, etc.. More than 40 functionally active recombinant pharmaceutical proteins such as vaccines and various other therapeutic proteins have been successfully produced through chloroplasts engineering. In this paper, we gave a review on recent advances in recombinant pharmaceuticals and vaccines production in chloroplasts. Some considerations for the chloroplast-derived pharmaceuticals production were also discussed
