04.01.04
The recent initiative of the World Health Organization in giving new guidelines for the cultivation, collection and harvesting of medicinal plants provides higher guarantees for patients and safeguards for the plant species at risk. The application of Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) is the means chosen by Indena, Milan, Italy, to ensure its supplies of botanical derivatives meet the required quality and safety standards. Since 1994, for example, the company has made great strides toward the cultivation of Echinacea angustifolia, the harvesting of which has often been limited in the U.S. Indena set out to collect some seeds of the genus Echinacea angustifolia in various areas where the plant was growing spontaneously. The seeds generated a first bulk of a plant population on which to start selection and improvement. The aim was to obtain plants with certain qualitative and productive characteristics, which would be germ-resistant. This work has developed using various techniques, not least of which is micro-propagation, which is a very useful method of propagating, in a short timescale, a large number of plants with the same characteristics of the selected mother plant. To meet its growing need for the roots of this plant, Indena recently extended the cultivation of Echinacea angustifolia to cover a surface of roughly 100 hectares, mostly in the U.S., where the plant grows spontaneously.