Tobacco To Help Treat Cancer?

Ever thought that a substance that is one of the major causes of cancerdefine can actually help in treating the deadly disease? Researchers from Stanford University in California are saying exactly the same. A new study suggests that the tobacco plant can offer the means to treat lymphoma, a form of cancer.

The idea is to use the tobacco plants as reservoirs for an antibody chemical which is similar to the cells that cause follicular B-cell lymphoma. These antibodies can then be put into a patient who has been recently diagnosed with the disease. The antibodies can help the immune systemdefine get prepared to attack any cell carrying them.

If this procedure works then, the lymphoma cells can actually be destroyed after being recognised by the body. UK specialists said that the new research is really exciting but a lot more work needs to be done in order to know how the vaccine actually works.

Scientists have earlier also attempted to grow these antibodies inside animal cells. But the success rate has not been 100%.

But if a vaccine is developed from the tobacco plant then it will be cheaper and the risk involved with the patient could be lessened to a large extent. This is so because animal cells might hold unknown viruses harmful for the human beings.

Dr. Ronald Levy, who is leading the research said, “Its pretty cool technology- and it’s really ironic that you would make a treatment for cancerdefine out of tobacco. That appealed to me.”

He further elaborated that the technology used actually helps to extract the gene responsible for producing the antibody from the cells of the cancer patient. This gene is added to the “tobacco mosaic virus”. The added gene produces large quantities of antibody in the injected plant.

A spokesman for Cancer Research UK said “While these results could potentially be very exciting, this was a small and early-stage trial and it did not look at whether this vaccination strategy reduced the size of the tumours.”