Summary.

The plants are one of the attractive sources of novel antitumor compounds. The plantspecific secondary products were long considered a major limitation for an extensive use of plantmade pharmaceuticals in human therapy. To extend the research to human clinical studies, we needed to find a reliable supply of plant material produced target compounds. Our goal here is to emphasize all the progress towards humanization of secondary metabolites in plant in vitro cultures, and to illustrate that plant typical anticancer compounds progressively emerge as additional advantages for using this promising expression system. This article summarizes the results concerning the production of certain plant anticancer compounds by in vitro cultures. The various problems involved and the possible ways to overcome them using biotechnological approaches are discussed on the basis of examples from lierature and our own research.