US

Demonized by the anti-tobacco crowd as the crop of death, tobacco may just leave its detractors speechless as latest medical breakthrough from the Kentucky Bio-Processing plant near Owensboro shows that the plant may have a bright future as a cancer fighter.
It appears that tobacco may be the missing link in the production of cancer fighting drugs thanks to its resilience and its quick maturing cycle. The development of several interesting drugs focuses on the tobacco plant’s ability to replicate critical proteins that will then be used to develop a drug that would remove cancer cells from the lung.

Although the development of functional disease-fighting proteins is not new, the typical practice to grow these proteins involves using animal parts, yeast or viruses, but tobacco has proven much more effective because of how rapidly it grows, the volume of the plant and the inexpensive way it can be processed.  
To grow the proteins on a commercial scale, tobacco plants are infected with a specially engineered virus which then replicates and helps recreate the much-needed proteins.