14 DAY TRIAL // While tobacco is most of the time advertised as a destructive plant, not many people know that it contains substances that can be successfully used to fight several wide-spread medical conditions, such as a few autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, including diabetes. Just recently, a team of experts from a number of European research organizations have published a new paper in the latest issue of the open access journal BMC Biotechnology, detailing the way they have used genetically-engineered tobacco plants for this very purpose.
The large initiative, dubbed the Pharma-Planta project, has been spearheaded by University of Verona scientist professor Mario Pezzotti and has focused on creating transgenic tobacco plants able to produce the biologically-active, potent anti-inflammatory cytokin interleukin-10 (IL-10). The international team has used three different cellular regions in the engineered plants to target the protein towards, as well as two varieties of IL-10, one obtained from a virus and the other one from a mouse model.
Much to everyone's surprise, the tobacco plants have proven to be highly effective in processing both forms of IL-10, and, in addition, have done so in quantities large enough to guarantee a fairly uncomplicated extraction process, one that will not rely on complex procedures to extract the cytokin. With the first phase of the project ending in such a success, the team is now pondering growing sufficient amounts of the modified plant for direct use.
That is to say, they will create mouse models with the autoimmune disease, and then they will feed the animals with tobacco leaves. It's up to nature from there on and, if the IL-10 compound works, the team should be able to notice changes within a few days or weeks. In addition, the researchers will use small doses of the stuff to test if they generate immunity in mice towards type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), in combination with other drugs usually given to people with a high risk of developing the disease.
“Transgenic plants are attractive systems for the production of therapeutic proteins because they offer the possibility of large scale production at low cost, and they have low maintenance requirements. The fact that they can be eaten, which delivers the drug where it is needed, thus avoiding lengthy purification procedures, is another plus compared with traditional drug synthesis,” Pezzotti concluded.