(WHAS11) -- It's a medical breakthrough that might change your opinion about tobacco.
Villified as a cancer causing crop, tobacco can provide a key function in the production of cancer fighting drugs, Kentucky researchers say.
"The irony isn't lost on us," said Dr. Keith Davis, Executive Director of the Owensboro Cancer Research Program, "It's kind of interesting now that we are using tobacco to try to cure cancer."
Kentucky farmers have known tobacco not only as a cash crop, but a way of life for more than 200 years.
Shelby County tobacco farmer Ray Tucker's ancestors helped make Louisville the biggest tobacco market in the country in the second half of the 19th century."
"Our family farm started back in 1847," Tucker explained.
Yet, as tobacco's reputation has shifted from a way of life to a way of death, Tucker is unsure if the family tradition will carry to a seventh generation. In recent years, cigarette sales have dropped and tobacco prices have fallen.
"It is a way of life," Tucker said, "but we have to look at it as a business. So if tobacco's not working, we'll have to expand to other areas."
Tobacco's brightest future may lie in a different field.
As Tucker inspects his 100 acres of tobacco in Shelby County, 143 miles away, college intern Laura Thompson inspects her tobacco crop at the Owensboro Cancer Research Program.
"Being able to cure cancer with a tobacco plant is pretty crazy, because most of the time tobacco is well known for lung cancer," Thompson said.
"Every morning when we walk in, we walk past the patients who are lined up for their chemotherapy treatment and so we see the faces of the people that ultimately we would like to be able to help," Davis added.
Research is aimed at developing a tobacco derived drug to remove lung cancer cells.
"We're a few years from there, but that's the goal," Davis said.
"I have a project in my lab where we're engineering a soybean protein and expressing it in the tobacco system that has activity against non small cell lung cancer," Davis revealed, "So, we're trying to develop a therapeutic protein that we do produce in tobacco."
For lung cancer patients, the tobacco drug would be used as a follow up treatment to kill remaining tumor cells after initial treatment, Davis said.
Though tobacco is a key component in the process, the drug development does not draw on any of tobacco's medicinal properties, but on its broad leaves and ability to reproduce proteins critical to the process.
"We're not actually isolating a chemical or a compound that tobacco normally makes to use as a drug," Davis explained, "We're really just using tobacco as a factory to make proteins that have therapeutic value."
"While pharmaceutical companies often use animal parts such as hamster ovaries to grow the proteins used in drug production, in Owensboro, researchers are instead using tobacco.
There are other alternatives to make proteins for drug production, such as E. coli and yeast. Yet, tobacco is regarded as superior by the Kentucky researchers because of how rapidly it grows, the volume of the plant and how relatively inexpensively the plant can be processed.
Near the Owensboro airport, a companion facility, the futuristic Kentucky Bio-Processing plant, takes the research to a massive scale.
There, tobacco plants are infected with a specially engineered tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) to grow the desired proteins for large scale production.
"We use the plants basically as a bio-reactor," said KBP Chief Operating Officer Barry Bratcher, "We're able to place a virus into the plant and we use the plant's machinery to reproduce and replicate that virus in our protein that we can then harvest and produce."
After the virus spreads throughout the rapidly growing tobacco plant, the infected leaves are harvested and processed. KBP grinds the infected plant and extracts the desired proteins.
"It's a lot of leaf," Bratcher explained, "It's a lot of biomass and it's rapid movement througout the leaf. Also, tobacco is kind of the white rat of the plant world. There's more known about this in every variety."
While tobacco cancer drugs are still several years behind use by humans, Kentucky BioProcessing has already developed other products for drug companies, including a drug to prevent HIV.
The Griffithsin drug has proven too expensive to produce in its native form, but when mass produced inside modified tobacco leaves, the drug could soon become a standard HIV preventive measure.
Tobacco also promises a quicker turnaround for flu vaccines, which could lead to better accuracy as drug companies predict what flu strains to identify and develop vaccines.
"What in a traditional system may take 24 to 36 months, we can do in typically a month to four months," Bratcher said, "and then be able to commercially produce it within 12 months."
KBP has been in operation for about 20 years and has already developed products for companies, including large scale manufacturing for clinical trials.
"We're able then to produce these pharmaceuticals for companies to use in clinical trials eventually going into human use," Bracther said.
As demand grows, it remains to be seen whether Kentucky's tobacco farmers will reap any benefits.
"We would envision farmers having greenhouses where they would be growing tobacco plants to feed the facility," Davis suggested as one possibility, "So, I think there is an opportunity for the local growers to do it and it will be a mix of field grown crop as well as greenhouse grown."
It's a weed that has paid the bills for many a Kentucky farmer, a killer crop that could soon save lives.
"It's pretty cool," Thompson smiled, "It's pretty exciting. I think about that a lot."
