The hidden friendly side of tobacco: how can you use controversial plants in good condition?

Cigarettes kill 8 million people worldwide each year, but imagine if they can be used to make medicines. The idea is not unheard of. Tobacco has been used as a herbal medicine in the past. But in the age of genetic engineering, tobacco may be the future of pharmaceutical production on the planet and beyond.

European explorers first encountered cigarettes in America in the 16th century. There, indigenous people used it for centuries, inhaled, ingested or topically used for many diseases such as headaches, colds, pain, and stomach clasps.

Tobacco became a panacea in 16th century Europe and was prescribed almost everything. But the most strange use is probably as a treatment for the symptoms of drowsiness in the 18th century. The cigarette smoke intestinal kit was kept by the River Thames in London. If someone falls, they wake up in shock with one of these kits. The idea was that cigarette smoke would provide warmth and stimulation.

There is little evidence that tobacco is essentially medicinal, but its harm was observed in the 18th century.

Many of our modern medicines come from plants, such as cancer chemotherapy taxol from yew trees and digoxin, a heart medicine from fox gloves. These drugs are small molecules. However, when something more complicated is needed, like protein-based medicines such as insulin and vaccines, the devices involved will become much more technical.

Most of these more complex drugs are the products of a kind of genetic engineering called recombinant technology. For example, the genetic material needed to make insulin is combined with the genetic material of the cell. That cell (which could be a bacterial, yeast, or animal cell) now produces insulin along with its own protein. It’s like when your child secretly slides a chocolate bar for another parent’s shopping.

This technology is extremely expensive (approximately USD 2 billion, or £1.5 billion) due to the huge VAT or bioreactors needed to cultivate recombinant cells in sterile conditions. This makes access to these types of medicine difficult for low-income countries.

This is where cigarettes can make a difference. Like the recombinant cells currently in use, plants are genetically designed to produce medicines. However, plants only need soil, water and sunlight to grow. Tobacco is the largest leafless, non-food crop. It is very suitable for genetic modifications and is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to protein production, whether it is unique or introduced. This, combined with high biomass, makes it the most prolific plant for pharmaceutical production.

It may be indigenous to America and Australia, but it is a resilient plant and can be grown all over the world. Thanks to the ease of genetic modification, tobacco can become even more resilient by tolerating drought.

This idea of ​​molecular agriculture remains new, but it is beginning to gain traction. In 2012, Canadian company Medicago demonstrated the speed of cigarettes as a production platform. They used tobacco to produce more than 10 million doses of influenza vaccines in a month. Globally, this achievement was groundbreaking given that it could produce 40 million vaccine doses per month.

Several clinical trials are currently underway considering immunotherapies produced in tobacco for diseases such as HIV and Ebola virus disease. The US is already undergoing emergency use to help healthcare workers return during the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak. These diseases disproportionately affect low-income countries, and tobacco is primarily grown in these countries.

Tobacco is even used to produce cancer immunotherapy. These cancer treatments work by boosting our own immune system to combat cancer cells with few side effects compared to traditional chemotherapy. However, these are very expensive, which could make the platform more accessible.

Smoking is causing great harm worldwide, but the decline in popularity will cause new problems. Tobacco farmers in low-income countries will lose their livelihoods. So why not reuse these crops?

Mars drugs

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” So, what is the future of cigarettes?

If you are thinking beyond the Earth and planning to visit or colonize other planets, we need medicine while we are there. Tobacco can grow all over the world, but wouldn’t it be on Mars? A packet of tobacco seeds takes up much less rocket space than five years of insulin, or the entire bioreactor facility for that problem. Furthermore, tobacco is an endless sauce, where seeds are collected and replanted.

However, before heading to Mars, we need to address the issues here. Sustainability is huge. Plants that extract medicines from today, such as yew trees, are now on the verge of extinction.

An emerging field is engineered tobacco for producing the same medicines that are normally extracted from these plants. Not only that, you can also produce expensive spices like saffron and flavors like raspberries at a fraction of the cost. Even the sky is not the limit of the possibilities of cigarettes.

This article will be republished from the conversation under a Creative Commons license. Please read the original article.