St. Louis-based Chlorogen wants to turn that association on its head by using tobacco to treat cancer.
 
Here’s how it works: By genetically altering the tobacco leaf, the chloroplasts—microscopic bodies within the leaf cells—produce a protein that can kill certain cancer cells.

That’s the theory, anyway. By targeting the chloroplast, Chlorogen’s technique yields more copies of the gene that expresses the protein, which some believe can be effective in treating a variety of cancers.
 
Using plants to produce a multitude of proteins has become an increasingly popular technique among a number of companies. Dow, Bayer, and BASF are entering the space, licensing intellectual property and patents, and going after the biologics market, which by various estimates stands at around $15 billion worldwide, and is growing by 7 to 8 percent a year.
 
The challenge is how to get the protein out of the tobacco plant in useful quantities. Chlorogen will use $6 million in recent venture funding to develop techniques to extract the protein from the tobacco plant and purify it without destroying the delicate protein in the process.

Getting plants to make drugs or drug-precursors, a technique sometimes called biopharming, biomanufacturing, or molecular farming, is more often associated with edible crops than tobacco.
Genetic modification of food crops has drawn fire—and lawsuits—from citizen groups and government agencies in recent years, in part because a genetically modified plant can potentially pollinate a non-genetically modified plant, and contaminate entire strains of food crops.
 
Tobacco’s non-food status is among the weed’s main attractions. Moreover, Mr. Duncan points out, the much-maligned leaf has the innate ability to produce massive amounts of pharmaceutical-grade proteins and compounds, much as the unaltered plant is able to produce large volumes of nicotine.
 
Dow AgroSciences has also acquired exclusive license for three patents related to using plants to produce various vaccines, and is currently working on treatments for the West Nile virus, avian flu, and canine diabetes.
 
All this is good news for American tobacco growers. Tobacco is a top 10 cash crop in the United States. The country is fourth behind China, Brazil, and India in world production, and third behind Brazil and China in exports.