October 15, 2001	Monday	Rajab 27, 1422

LONDON: It is blamed as a prime cause of cancer and has been responsible for millions of deaths across the globe. But now scientists have discovered how to use tobacco to save lives.

The transformation has been carried out by the Californian biotechnology company, Large Scale Biology Corporation, whose scientists have created tobacco plants that churn out chemicals that protect against leukaemias and lymphomas.

The corporation says its technique is particularly useful for dealing with leukaemias and lymphomas - which occur when a single white blood cell, a key part of our immune defences, proliferates uncontrollably, and eventually swamps the body.

We have millions of different varieties of white cell, each designed to defend the body against a different invading virus or bacteria. There are millions of subtly different forms of leukemia and lymphoma, each based on the spread of a slightly different type of white blood cell. Scientists have had to try to find a way to tackle one form of lymphoma and no other when dealing with an individual patient. And that is where the tobacco plant has provided crucial help.

Firstly, scientists have pinpointed the distinctive part of a lymphoma-causing white blood cell, the bit that distinguishes it from all other white blood cells. Then they have isolated the gene that makes that key component, put it in a tobacco mosaic virus and used the modified virus to infect a tobacco plant. As the virus replicates, it spews out white cell particles, and as the virus takes over the tobacco plant, it becomes coated with these protein pieces.

Corporation scientists have created patches of tobacco plants, each making proteins tailor-made to match a lymphoma from one of 16 different people. For their first trials, they used only sufferers of a cancer known as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relatively common, and potentially deadly condition.

Once the protein fragment from each person is scraped from their individual tobacco plant, it is injected back into that patient. Project scientist Dr Ronald Levy of Stanford University Medical Centre sais, “Essentially, we use them as a vaccine. Our immune systems often do not recognise a cancer or lymphoma as being foreign and dangerous and so allow it to spread. But by re-administering pieces of a cancer as a vaccine, it makes the body realize something is amiss. Suddenly, it starts to attack the tumour.”

Levy has carried out Phase I safety trials on 16 patients and have observed that their bodies mount immune attacks on their lymphomas even having previously ignored the cancer. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.