Good and Evil: A Cancer Vaccine from Tobacco Plants

Tobacco makes a comeback!!!

In the first human trial of its kind, a vaccine grown in genetically engineered tobacco plants has proved to be safe, paving the way to one day use it to help combat a potentially fatal form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that the experimental vaccine triggered the immune systems of 11 of 16 volunteers (with so-called follicular B-cell lymphoma) to attack their tumors without any apparent dangerous side effects.

Some 18,000 Americans, typically between the ages of 60 and 65, are diagnosed annually with this incurable, slow-growing type of cancer. Study coauthor Ronald Levy, an oncologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, says that physicians generally take their cues from the disease, waiting to see how fast it is moving—and treating it with toxic chemotherapy (sometimes with radiation) only if it becomes aggressive.

He says that if future trials are successful, the experimental vaccine, which can be made relatively quickly and cheaply, could become a short-term therapy administered immediately after diagnosis to try to keep tumors in check.

"This may not be a replacement for chemotherapies, but a supplement for them," Levy says. "A technology that is fast, like this one, is more amenable to a watchful waiting approach than a technology that is slow to produce."

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