High Throughput Extraction of Plant, Marine and Fungal Specimens for Preservation of Biologically Active Molecules

The Developmental Therapeutics Program (DTP) of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), at its NCI-Frederick facility, has built perhaps the largest and most diverse natural products screening library in the world for drug discovery. Composed of plant, marine organism and microbial extracts, it currently contains in excess of 230,000 unique materials. From the inception of this program to identify new anticancer chemotherapeutics from natural products sources in 1987, two extracts have been sequentially prepared from each specimen: one produced by organic solvent extraction, which yields a complex material that contains non- to moderately polar small molecules, and a water-soluble extract, a milieu largely unexplored for useful drugs in earlier years, which contains polar small to medium-sized molecules. Plant specimens and microbial ferments are extracted by modified traditional methods, while the method developed to produce extracts from marine organisms is unique and very different from that used by marine natural products chemists previously, but again yields both an organic solvent soluble and a water soluble material for inclusion into the screening library. Details of high throughput extract production for preservation of biologically active molecules are presented.