Taxol anti-tumor activity

Taxol has had a most unusual clinical development history. As with many natural products that have been discovered to provide therapeutic benefit to humans, it was the extract of a plant that provided the first hint of the oncological potential of this product. Natural product chemists typically subject purified plant extracts to screening for therapeuhc achvity. In 1963, an extract of the bark of the Pacific yew tree (Taxus brevifolia (Figure 7.2) showed anti-tumor activity. This early work was done by Monroe Wall and Monsukh Wani of the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) under the auspices of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) [3]. 

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