However strange this might sound, the tobacco plant, normally associated with causing cancer rather than curing it, could actually aid patients with follicular B-cell lymphoma, US researchers found.

Follicular B-cell Lymphoma is a type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that attacks the immune system. A B-cell is type of lymphocyte or white blood cell, which is responsible for defending the body against bacteria and other types of pathogens that cause illness.

For the study, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Large Scale Biology Corp. infected tobacco leaves with a virus laced with a gene from the cancer, thus triggering the plants into making antibodies of the type found on the tumors of individual patients.

“You scratch it on the leaves and it turns the plants into a protein-producing factory for the protein of interest. A week later, you extract the protein. It’s that fast,” the researchers reported.

Then, senior author of the study, Ronald Levy of the Stanford University and his team tested the plant-based vaccine on 16 patients recently diagnosed with follicular B-cell lymphoma. The researchers found that more than 70 percent of the patients developed an immune response, and 47 percent had specific immune response that was sought. The good part was that none of them experienced any significant side effects.

“This would be a way to treat cancer without side effects. The idea is to marshal the body’s immune system to fight cancer. We know that if you get the immune revved up, it can attack and kill cancer,” Dr. Levy said.

This is the first time the researchers tested a plant-based vaccine on humans. Previous trials involving cancer vaccines developed with animal or human cells had mixed results, Dr. Levy added.

The good news is that personalized cancer vaccines could be produced efficiently and cheaply using plants.

“This technology is special because it’s fast and very suitable to this customized, personalized approach because each plant can be making a different person’s vaccine,” Dr. Levy said.

However, more studies need to be done to confirm the effectiveness of this kind of vaccine. Dr. Levy’s study involved a small number of patients, so the vaccine’s effectiveness at fighting the disease is uncertain.

“While these results could potentially be very exciting, this was a small and early-stage trial and it did not look at whether this vaccination strategy reduced the size of the tumors,” a representative for Cancer Research UK told the BBC.

About 16,000 people are diagnosed with follicular B-cell lymphoma annually, which is incurable at this time. Doctors usually monitor the patients to see of their cancer worsens, rather than treat them with toxic chemotherapy. That’s why a vaccine like the one involved in this study is very important.

The study was funded by the US National Institutes of Health while Large Scale Biology Corp. based in Vacaville, California, provided the tobacco plants and technology to make the vaccine. As Large Scale Biology Corp. has no money for more studies on the vaccine, the researchers are now heading to pharmaceutical company Bayer, which has a similar technology for making the plant vaccine.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.