A group of researchers have found that a personalized vaccine that can be made using tobacco plants actually could help patients with lymphoma in fighting off their illness, Reuters reported July 21.

"Using tobacco to treat cancer — I love it," said Ron Levy, M.D., of the Stanford University School of Medicine, head of a research team that studied the potential of a genetically engineered tobacco plant to treat a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma called follicular B-cell lymphoma.

The research team added an antibody gene from a lymphoma patient's cancer cells to a virus that normally attacks tobacco plants, then infected the plants with this altered virus. Levy explained that when this happened, the plants became protein-producing factories. Injection of the protein into 16 lymphoma patients subsequently resulted in 70 percent of them developing an immune response, he said.

Scientists have a great deal of interest in developing vaccines from plants because the process is much quicker and less expensive than that of generating the vaccines in animals. Future research will be needed to determine whether the vaccine derived from tobacco could work as a full-fledged cancer treatment.

"This would be a way to treat cancer without side effects," Levy said. "The idea is to marshal the body's own immune system to fight cancer."

The research from Levy and colleagues appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.