Technology uses tobacco plants to fight cancer - Breakthrough

What would occur is to use the plant to make a protein to use the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. The plant were infected with the tobacco plants with a virus from the patient’s cancer cells and as little as a week later, the protein cells are extracted. It has been tested on a small group of people and 70% developed an immune response with no side effects. Personalized cancer vaccines could be produced and inexpensively too.

The same process could be used for other proteins too, according to the article, like hormones for one. This would be great if this process would prove to have a successful proven rate of performance. Who would have ever thought tobacco plants could be used as a vaccine or cure related. The research is being done at Stanford University. BD

CHICAGO (Reuters) - 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. 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.