This Tibbetts Award SBIR nomination highlights twenty years of successful SBIR research led by the team of Drs. David Radin and Carole Cramer, who have pioneered R&D leading to the introduction of bioengineered plants for manufacturing human therapeutic proteins. Their core innovation was achieved during their first SBIR award from NIH in 1993 which demonstrated that the normal gene for a human enzyme responsible for a rare genetic disease called Gauchers disease could be transformed into into plants and expressed to produce a bioactive human enzyme. This technology is expected to bethe first human therapeutic protein to achieve FDA approval for marketing in the US this spring.