National Cancer Institute antitumor screening program

Pharmacological activity has been studied for about 40 T. alkaloids. Some of these have been studied during a plant antitumor screening program carried out under the auspices of the National Cancer Institute of the U.S. National Institute... 

An earlier paper (1 ) described a method for estimating the probability of activity of compounds. In that report the method was applied to a small set of data for the purpose of comparing the performance to that of more sophisticated pattern recognition methods. The intended application was the large volume of data from the antitumor screening program of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). 

The first report of in vivo antitumor activity of a bryophyte appeared in 1986 in a review of results of screening of bryophytes in the National Cancer Institute s antitumor screening program by Spjut, Suffness, Cragg and Norris [20]. Subsequent studies, however, led to the conclusion that this bryophyte species, Claopodium crispifolium, was contaminated with a microorganism which contained maytansinoids, a well known class of antitumor macrolides [21]. 

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