Plants have been employed as a source of therapeutic products since the dawn of time, and many of today’s pharmaceuticals are produced directly or indirectly from them. For example, Artemisia annua, a medicinal plant containing bioactive compounds with pleiotropic biological properties, is one of the important sources of artemisinin, a potent anti-malarial drug (Uckun et al., 2021). The recent advancements in genetic engineering and molecular biology have created opportunities to produce a range of plant-based products of medicinal importance.

The main outcome of genetic engineering and agricultural biotechnology is the creation of transgenic crops where one or more genes of interest have been incorporated from different sources by different means. The particle gun approach (biolistic method) or Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation method is being used to develop the majority of transgenic plants.

The aim of inserting transgenes into the plant genome is to make it more productive and useful. Even though there have been some controversies related to genetically modified plants, their global planting area is constantly increasing (Turnbull et al., 2021). Currently, farmers grow approximately 190 million hectares of transgenic crops, which is roughly the same size as Mexico’s whole surface area (ISAAA, 2020). The conventional usage of genetically modified plants has recently moved beyond food and feed production, with new generations of transgenic plants having unique applications including agricultural-scale pharmaceutical biosynthesis (Paul et al., 2015).