TUESDAY, July 22, (News Locale) - The much-vilified tobacco plant may turn out to be a boon for some cancer sufferers. Researchers from Stanford University in California have used the tobacco plant to grow vital components of a vaccine targeted at a type of cancer called the lymphoma.

The Stanford researchers are using plants to find components that can target follicular B-cell lymphoma, which is a type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The lymph cells in this type of cancer start attacking the body's own immune system.

In the current study, the plant-based vaccine was tested on 16 patients recently diagnosed with follicular B-cell lymphoma. The researchers in collaboration with Large Scale Biology Corp induced the tobacco plants to produce antibodies for follicular B-cell lymphoma by infecting the plant with a virus that had a gene for the cancer in it.

Within days the tobacco plants produced antibodies, which were then injected into the patients. Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say 70 percent of the patients developed an immune response to the cancer, while some 47 percent had the type of specific immune response the researchers wanted.

Lead researcher Ronald Levy of the Stanford University said the method was a great way to kill cancer, "The idea is to marshal the body’s immune system to fight cancer. We know that if you get the immune revved up, it can attack and kill cancer,” he added.

The study was funded by the US National Institutes of Health.

The research is exciting because the sheer volume of antibodies produced by this method is highly personalized. This means the immune cells produced by the plant are tailor-made to fight the specific cancer a person has. Every cancer has different immune response in every patient - so a method that makes customized vaccine may benefit such patients.