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Technology Uses Tobacco Plants to Fight Cancer

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By: Sean Moloughney

Editor, Nutraceuticals World

A personalized vaccine made using tobacco plants—normally associated with causing cancer rather than helping cure it—could aid people with lymphoma in fighting the disease, U.S. researchers said on Monday (July 21).

The treatment, which would vaccinate cancer patients against their own tumor cells, is made using a new approach that turns genetically engineered tobacco plants into personalized vaccine factories.

“This is the first time a plant has been used for making a protein to inject into a person,” said Dr. Ron Levy of Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This would be a way to treat cancer without side effects,” Levy said in a statement. “The idea is to marshal the body’s own immune system to fight cancer.”

Levy was working with a team of scientists from the now defunct Large Scale Biology Corp., which helped fund the study, as well as Bayer AG’s Bayer HealthCare, CBR International Corp., Integrated Biomolecule Corp., The Biologics Consulting Group Inc. and Holtz Biopharma Consulting.

They were working on a type of cancer known as follicular B-cell lymphoma, a kind of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that attacks the immune system. The cancer makes a specific antibody that is not found in healthy cells.

In a test of 16 patients with follicular B-cell lymphoma, 70 percent of people injected with a made-to-order vaccine developed an immune response, and none had any side effects.

Levy said the study suggests personalized cancer vaccines could be produced efficiently and cheaply using plants. Future studies will be needed to show how effective they are as a treatment.

—Julie Steenhuysen, ABC News, 7/21/08

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