New technology can reduce the cost of extracting plant medicinal ingredients

Plants are an important source of drugs, but the cost of extracting some medicinal components from plants is very high, which limits the promotion and use of these drugs Researchers in the UK and South Korea have reported that they have developed a new technology to produce drugs from plant stem cells, which can significantly reduce the cost of extracting medical ingredients such as Taxol Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in the UK and their Korean counterparts reported in the new issue of Nature Biotechnology that taxol extracted from the bark of yew is widely used in the treatment of lung cancer and breast cancer drugs, but traditional extraction methods often peel the bark, not only with high cost, but also with harmful by-products to the environment In order to solve this problem, British and Korean researchers have developed a new technology, which only needs to isolate and culture stem cells located in the meristem of the tip of Taxus, can make them produce a large amount of taxol, its cost is greatly reduced compared with the traditional extraction method, and will not produce harmful by-products The preliminary experimental results show that this technology can be used to extract taxol from Taxus and some other plants Gary Locke, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who participated in the study, said that about a quarter of the drugs used now come from plants If this low-cost, environmentally friendly and safe extraction technology is promoted, it is expected to better develop the medicinal value of plants.