Modern cancer therapy uses more and more natural plant compounds for the development
of new therapeutics during the last years. Some of them are rather approachable by
the use of bioreactor and/or cell culture techniques than by green house cultivation
or wild collection. More than 200 different species of herbs and rare medicinal plants
with traditional use were taken into in vitro culture. In bioreactors with fully automated nutrient and gas exchange root, shoot
and cell cultures were cultivated under different growth conditions. About 500 extracts
were analysed by Analyticon's LC/MS-based Chemodiversity Profiling Platform. Combining
bioreactor technology with high throughput screening methods high productive plants
were selected according to their biomass production and content of active compounds.
First results have been shown that in vitro cell and organ cultures can produce quantitatively more active compounds than plants
of wild collection or green house culture. Compared to this, 20% of the bioreactor
material showed a new chemical pattern of natural compounds. In addition, spectrum
of secondary metabolites varies at different in vitro culture types. The most promising in vitro cultures were selected for scale-up in 5 to 10l bioreactors to optimise the production
of preferable compounds. Fractionation of selected extracts and structure elucidation
demonstrate that in vitro cultures are able to produce secondary metabolites with the same structural diversity
as traditionally grown plants. Therefore, in vitro cultivated plants combined with the screening platform technology are an attractive
source for identification of novel drugs and providing natural plant compounds as
pharmaceutical products.
