Tobacco is well-known as a leading cause of cancer, but according to a study by Stanford researchers, it may one day become widely used to cure it.

The study, published Monday in a National Academy of Science journal, concludes that tobacco plants may be engineered cheaply and quickly to grow safe antibodies, which can potentially be used to battle cancer.

“This study, in some forms, has been going on for about 20 years,” said Stanford Medical School Prof. Ronald Levy, senior author of the study.

The research began when Large Scale Biology Corp., a biomanufacturing company, approached Levy with a new technology in which tobacco plants are infected with a virus to spur the plants to produce proteins.

“I gave them [Large Scale Biology Corp.] genes from mouth tumors, and a month later they came back with the protein they had grown from tobacco plants,” Levy said. “We tested the proteins in mice, and the proteins worked effectively as vaccines to spur the immune system.

“We then moved the study into clinical trial, which is what this paper is all about,” he added.

Unlike current vaccines such as Gardasil, which protects against the virus that causes cervical cancer, the vaccines in the study are therapeutic — they could actually cure existing cases.

A total of 16 B-cell lymphoma patients participated in the study. Since each patient has a unique cancer antibody, 16 personalized vaccines were produced and reproduced from tobacco plants.

These experimental vaccines indeed triggered safe immune responses, without side effects, in a majority of the patients tested in the clinical trial.

“If successful and effective, this process can be developed into a vaccine to treat patients with lymphoma,” Levy said.

Approximately 18,000 Americans are diagnosed annually with B-cell lymphoma, which is a slow-growing, incurable type of cancer that is usually left untreated in its early stages. These plant-grown vaccines could provide a more aggressive treatment for this cancer.

Cancer patients are not the only ones that stand to benefit from the study.

“There are lots of diseases for which proteins are needed,” Levy said. “This vaccine production technology, if proven effective, can also be used for hormone injections, enzyme replacement and to produce monoclonal antibodies.”

Levy, however, cautioned that this study only concluded that plant-produced vaccines could incite immune responses and that such vaccines were safe. The study did not test to see if the vaccines did the patients any good in the long term. Testing the effectiveness and benefit of the personalized, plant-produced vaccines will be the next step of the study, which will be a second-phase clinical trial.

Levy and his team of researchers would like to produce more personalized plant-vaccine products for a larger number of patients in the next trial.

The study has already generated significant interest, both because of its promise as a new form of cancer therapy, and because of the plant that it uses.

“I find it ironic that tobacco is now part of an instrument that could potentially make treatments for cancer,” Levy said, “because people usually think of tobacco as a cause of cancer.”

Just don’t expect a tobacco-aided cancer cure to come in smoke-able form.