An Alternative Approach for Anticancer Compounds Production Through Plant Tissue Culture Techniques

Higher plants produce various anticancer secondary metabolites (colchicine, camptothecin, combretastatin, paclitaxel, plumbagin, podophyllotoxin, psoralen, vincristine, vinblastine, etc.). The indiscriminate harvesting of these plants from the wild for the metabolites and inadequate efforts for cultivation led to a decrease in natural populations. However, these metabolites/compounds exist in low quantities, and it is economically not feasible to obtain them in large scale. Moreover, the accumulation of these metabolites varies from its geographical and environmental conditions. Alternatively, economically feasible production strategies should be investigated in order to overcome these problems and to overproduce the metabolites of therapeutic importance. To this perspective, advances in plant cell and tissue cultures, mainly culturing of cells/tissues, suspension cultures, precursor feeding, hairy root cultures, and bioreactors using cell suspensions/hairy root cultures are evaluated as the feasible and cost-effective alternative means for the production of economically important compounds. The present chapter summarizes the latest techniques/strategies for the overproduction of anticancer metabolites using plant cell and tissue culture approaches.