Myth: Tobacco Plants Are Only For Smoking
As the world strives for a future that drastically reduces or even eliminates smoking, the question arises: What will happen to tobacco farmers? Is the tobacco plant useful for anything outside of products to be smoked?
Your Safer Nicotine Wiki (SNW) team explores the answers to those questions below.
Nicotine
Potential Therapeutic Benefits
- Please see our page "Nicotine therapeutic benefits" for a surprising list of possibilities.
Tobacco Plants
Medicinal Uses of Tobacco
- Conclusion: "In my own review of the published work four points struck me forcibly. First, too much was expected of tobacco. In medieval times, most herbs would be used only for a few conditions in which it was deemed effective—not for a vast range of disorders from head lice to haemorrhoids, from hysteria to tetanus, as happened with tobacco. Secondly, writings on this subject commonly imply that nicotine is the only active medicinal constituent, yet the various species of Nicotiana contain many other alkaloids. Thirdly, the leaves and juice were much used for skin disorders, possibly including basal cell cancer. Might tobacco leaves contain an anticancer agent, as proved to be the case with periwinkle (vinca alkaloids)? Fourthly, in therapeutic applications of tobacco, dosage was largely uncontrolled. With any useful agent, excess dosage will do harm. I suggest we should set aside the prejudices generated by the ill-effects of tobacco smoking and examine the leaves systematically for substances of therapeutic value."
Using the plant to make vaccines and medicines - Studies, Scholarly Comments
2024: Phytochemicals derived from Nicotiana tabacum L. plant contribute to pharmaceutical development
- "Modern medical and pharmaceutical studies have investigated that the abundant and distinctive function metabolites in tobacco including nicotine, solanesol, cembranoid diterpenes, essential oil, seed oil and other tobacco extracts, avoiding the toxic components of smoke, mainly have the anti-oxidation, anti-lipid production, pro-lipid oxidation, pro-insulin sensitivity, anti-inflammation, anti-apoptosis and antimicrobial activities. They showed potential pharmaceutical value mainly as supplements or substitutes for treating neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, inflammatory diseases including colitis, arthritis, sepsis, multiple sclerosis, and myocarditis, and metabolic syndrome including Obesity and fatty liver. This review comprehensively presents the research status and the molecular mechanisms of tobacco and its metabolites basing on almost all the English and Chinese literature in recent 20 years in the field of medicine and pharmacology."
- Tobacco (especially Nicotiana rustica L.) in this area is described as a potent medicinal plant, used topically or via ingestion to treat a variety of health conditions. The goal of this transdisciplinary field study was to investigate clinical applications of the tobacco plant as per Amazonian medicine exemplified in the practice of a reputed Maestro Tabaquero, an Amazonian traditional healer whose medical specialization focuses on tobacco-based treatments.
- Alternative cost-effective vaccine production approaches need to be developed. This study on plant-based (tobacco) expression of capsomeres supports the development of cost-effective thermostable HPV vaccines, which is highly desirable for resource poor countries.
- The possibility of a high-level production of vaccines in tobacco against pandemic influenza or anthrax and plague due to a bioterroristic attack, as well as of individualized anticancer vaccines against non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) in a much shorter period of time than by traditional methods became realistic and hence caused increased interest in tobacco as a high-efficient producer of vaccines not only of specialistic biotechnology firms but also a big pharmaceutical corporation and a department of defense.
- This work offers new technology for creating vaccines and hope for reducing vaccine costs.
Using the plant to make vaccines and medicines - Articles, News, Blogs, etc.
- "Professor David Craik and Dr Mark Jackson from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience have demonstrated native wild tobacco, Nicotiana benthamiana, can potentially produce large quantities of drugs, cheaper and more sustainably than industrial manufacturing methods."
- "The researchers grew the drug T20K, which is currently in phase 1 clinical trials to treat multiple sclerosis (MS), a devastating autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system...We have shown it is possible to scale up production of cyclotides in plants, providing a platform for growing other medications for pain, cancer or obesity,” Professor Craik said."
- Most influenza vaccines are currently made using virus particles grown in and harvested from chicken eggs or lab-grown cells, which takes months even after scientists work out which flu strains (and surface proteins) they need to target.
- Plants, which can be engineered to produce select proteins and cultivated at scale, could be an alternative, helping to boost our capacity to produce seasonal flu vaccines.
- Two biotech companies are using the tobacco plant, Nicotiana benthamiana, as bio-factories to produce a key protein from the coronavirus that can be used in a vaccine.
- While large pharmaceutical companies are already producing vaccines, BAT believes its own can be produced in six weeks, compared with the several months it takes using conventional methods.
- BAT also says its vaccine is stable at room temperature, unlike the Pfizer/BioNTech jab being administered in the UK, which must be stored and transported at about -70C.
- The vaccine has been developed by BAT’s biotechnology division, Kentucky BioProcessing (KBP), which has previously worked on a treatment for Ebola and is also developing a seasonal flu vaccine.
- "The first plant to be used to produce a recombinant antibody, back in 1988, was the tobacco plant. Other plants have also been used for pharmaceutical production, such as maize, wheat, tomato, potato, mustard, banana, and soybean. Tobacco is preferred as the host plant because of its rapid growth and high volume of production. It expresses foreign products much more quickly than with bioreactors, and at a significantly reduced cost."
Is there opposition to using tobacco plants to make vaccines and medicines? If yes, why?
- "The World Health Organization (WHO) has championed the need for out-of-the-box thinking on vaccine production and supplies to protect the world. But when faced with that very situation, the WHO evoked a 2005 policy, and sentenced a promising made-in-Canada vaccine to a tragic death because of a minority link with a tobacco company...A year ago, officials with the agency refused to endorse a vaccine made by Quebec-based Medicago. It used a plant related to tobacco as the "factory" to produce virus-like particles that taught the immune system to fend off the virus that causes COVID-19...The Medicago technology was also widely seen as having great potential for creating both vaccines and antibody treatments for other conditions, including cancers, arthritis and multiple sclerosis. But the plants used in production are a cousin of the tobacco plant and were supplied by tobacco giant Phillip Morris, which was a minority (21 per cent) shareholder...One advantage Medicago's product had over some of the approved vaccines is that it doesn't have the same cold storage requirement as mRNA shots, and so "would have been more suitable for Africa and places like that," said Watts."
Other potential uses for tobacco plants
- "But tobacco is also used a lot in scientific research. And a new study shows tobacco can be genetically engineered to churn out large amounts of a commercially important bacterial enzyme known as cellulase. The enzyme has many industrial uses, including as an agent in the production of biofuel...University of Illinois plant biologist Justin McGrath is a co-lead author of the study. He says the work could lead to lower costs for producing useful proteins like enzymes and some vaccines. That’s because it can be way cheaper to cultivate tobacco plants in a field than to grow genetically modified yeast and other microbes indoors in large fermenters."