EU researchers look at sourcing medicines from plant cells

An EU research project is spending Euro 6m on studying ways of synthesising medicines from plant cell extracts rather than live plants.

Scientists in the SmartCell project are developing tools to manufacture cell collections able to produce pharmaceutically active substances on a large scale.

This kind of operation has proved difficult in the past, but its value is appreciated, because, said a European Commission report: "Many plants that produce these high-value compounds are difficult to cultivate or are overharvested."

A spokesman for project co-ordinator VTT Technical Research Centre, of Finland, noted "the exact mechanisms by which plants can produce these small-molecular-weight compounds [are] poorly understood."