Tobacco As Cancer Cure?

Long considered one of the evil plants of our time, it turns out that tobacco may hold a cure to cancer.

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.

“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.

Here's hoping that this research pans out.