PRISNA:
Natural Product-Derived Compound Library
Plant extracts and natural products derived from plants are widely used in medicines, cosmetics, agrochemicals, flavours, fragrances, food additives, dyes and numerous other applications as fine chemicals and specialty chemicals.
Of all natural products known, about 1 in 1000 is used as medicine, a number which is much more favourable than in drug development using synthetic compounds. In the latter case many of the most approach of the past decade has for example not been very successful in providing novel drugs. Successful ones are based on natural products as a model (e.g. aspirin). Plants are thus a very important source for exploration for novel products in all the above mentioned areas.
A possible drawback of natural sources for the production of specialty chemicals is the supply. Wild growing plants from remote areas can be difficult to cultivate. Moreover, exploration of biodiversity by industry is hampered by the problems of defining what is fair benefit-sharing with the countries that own the rights of their biodiversity.
Due to these problems, other readily accessible, abundant and reproducible sources for exploring plants for novel products are required.
The solution:
One of the countries with the richest biodiversity is the Netherlands. This biodiversity exists in all the plants grown for cut-flowers, ornamental plants for the house or garden and vegetables. An estimate of 60.000 species and varieties has been made. For example in the bulb families there are 788 species from 60 genera with a total of 19.470 varieties including the family Amaryllidaceae with 18 genera, 164 species and 6490 commercial varieties. All these plants are already grown, some in small scale, some in large scale, and can all be scaled up to any desired quantities, as growth conditions are known. They can also be grown under Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) conditions.
PRISNA B.V. offers extracts of such plants. This can be in the form of 96 wells mother plates containing extracts of plants for screening purposes, but also bulk materials.
We have access to industrial scale extraction facilities that can work under GMP production rules for pharmaceuticals.
If desired the plant extracts can be given with a metabolic fingerprint for future reference. Facilities for pre-fractionation of extracts and purification by using specially developed centrifugal partitioning chromatography methods are also available. Plant extracts can be delivered with documentation on previously found compounds and data on biological effects reported. Fingerprints of the extracts by means of HPLC, GC or NMR are a further option.
Service offered:
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