Plant Cell Cultures and Synthetic Chemistry—Routes to Clinically Important Compounds

Abstract

The plant kingdom has provided a wide variety of natural products with diverse chemical structures and a vast array of biological activities, many of which have found applications in the health sciences. For years, synthetic chemists have had the challenge of developing syntheses of such components, but often due to structural complexity the resulting multi-step syntheses rarely find application in the large scale production required in the pharmaceutical drug industry. As a result, starting materials for such drug production, or indeed the final clinical drug, are frequently obtained from tedious and often costly extraction from the living plant. This latter solution is often fraught with well known problems: a) an active agent is present in minute amounts in the plant extract; b) separation of the target compound may be difficult and, in turn, expensive; c) varying concentrations of the target compound depending on seasons during which plant collection is performed; d) desired plant species growing in geographically or politically inaccessible regions, etc.