 Technology uses tobacco plants to help fight cancer
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-23 07:30 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, US researchers said on Monday. 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. The technology exploits the tobacco plant's vulnerability a virus that only attacks tobacco plants, which most people associate with causing cancer, and not curing it. The researchers altered the virus, adding the specific antibody gene from a patient's cancer cells. Then, they infected the tobacco plants with the gene-carrying virus. "You scratch it on the leaves and it turns the plants into a protein-producing factory for the protein of interest," Levy said. Other approaches that use animals to make the vaccines can take months, but the plant-based approach is very fast. Agencies (China Daily 07/23/2008 page11) |
