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Medicines from tobacco plants

Leverkusen/Halle – In conjunction with its subsidiary Icon Genetics, Bayer has developed a new process by which biotech drugs can be produced in tobacco plants. A new facility that employs this process was recently inaugurated at Halle in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

Promoting health: Professor Yuri Gleba (right) and Thomas Prochaska with a tobacco plant.

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Promoting health: Professor Yuri Gleba (right) and Thomas Prochaska with a tobacco plant.

In the future, the active substances produced in the tobacco plants could be used to develop new approaches to the therapy and prevention of diseases where current medical options are not satisfactory.

The project is of particular significance in terms of personalized medicine, since tobacco plants produce proteins rapidly at high yields, opening up the prospect of therapies that so far have not been viable for economic reasons.

The first plant-made protein from the pilot facility in Halle that will be a candidate for clinical development is a patient-specific antibody vaccine for the treatment of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), a malignant disorder of the lymphatic system. Phase I testing is scheduled to begin in 2009.