R.C. Anderson
Tobacco Seen In a New Light
September 4th 2008 15:36
For years it has been known that tobacco causes cancer and it has been derided as one of the worst things you can do to your body. It is especially regrettable since all the problems tobacco causes are preventable. In the August 22 issue of Science, Dr. McCormick and colleagues have found a way to use tobacco plants to create vaccines against lymphoma that are directed specifically toward each patient.
By using a biopsy sampled from a tumor or lymph node, scientists can put a small piece of the tumor's DNA inside a virus, such as a tobacco virus. When this virus is then put into it's tobacco host, it starts to replicate, generating proteins from the patient's DNA along with the other viral proteins. The patient proteins can then be used as a patient-specific vaccine to jump-start the patient's immune system. The immune system can then directly attack the cancer cells. An added benefit is that the immune system does not attack normal cells, instead they head straight for the cancer cells to destroy them.
Although this type of technology has been used a bit in the past, only small companies did a lot of work with plant-based vaccines. McCormick's work, however, proved that 70% of the patients given the vaccine responded to it and that the vaccine could be ready for the patient in as little as 12 weeks. This is faster than the previous method of creating human vaccines via plants which was slow, complicated and usually took so long the patient had already begun chemotherapy treatements by the time the vaccine was ready.
Bayer AG, a well-known pharmaceutical company, has become interested in this new way of creating human vaccines and is set to open a facility which will use tobacco plants on a large scale for patient-specific lymphoma vaccines. Although it may be years before this type of technology becomes common and wide-spread, it will certainly change how we view cancer and the patient's options.
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