An economic and technical assessment of the use of plant cell cultures for natural product synthesis on an industrial scale.

Plant cell cultures may be used as an alternative source of established natural products, as a source of novel 'lead' compounds or as a source of enzymes for modification of precursors. Only a few plant cell processes are operating commercially and their performance characteristics are industrial secrets. The economic aspects of natural product synthesis in plant cell cultures are presented on the basis of data derived from work on a pilot plant with bioreactors of 5-80 litres in which cells are grown in batch liquid culture. Cost analysis shows that the labour costs of operating plant cell culture processes are much higher than those for microbial processes, which reflects the longer process times of plant systems. These can be reduced by increasing the cell growth rate, the biomass yield and/or the product yield. Higher yields can be obtained by optimizing media conditions, but there are no standard guidelines for this. Each system has to be developed individually. Reducing the number of production runs a year, usually by increasing the number of days for which each batch of cells is synthesizing product, can markedly decrease costs. Economic assessment of the viability of production in plant cell cultures must consider not only production costs but also the expected market price of the product and the volume of sales.