**6. Conclusions**

Molecular pharming has been recently and extensively reviewed, and the future of this technology has gathered some optimistic expectations. A myriad of studies have already demonstrated the capacity of various plant species and systems to produce recombinant pharmaceutical proteins and peptides. This technology has already been put to the test in case of emerging threats, where transient platforms proved to be strategic for rapid production of large amounts of recombinant proteins in response to pandemic situations. However, their usefulness for the production of functional foods still falls short of expectations, as well as the attainment of its full potential in bioactive peptide production. With the improvement of known plant platforms and development of new genetic engineering techniques and their exploration, it is forthcoming an evolution in the production of heterologous bioactive peptides, to which we hope to contribute with our ACEI pharming project. The advent of genome editing techniques (with the advantage of site- specific gene insertion), like the CRISPR/Cas9 methodology, will undoubtedly increase and democratize plant transformation events and will certainly contribute to the increase of genetically modified species for molecular pharming purposes.
