A new discovery aims to put the tobacco plant in a different light by claiming that it could be modified to produce an anti-cancer drug. Etoposide, a chemotherapy drug is used to treat tumours in lungs, ovaries, testes as well as lymphoma. At present, there is no way to produce etoposide without one of its key ingredients, a compound called podophyllotoxin, which is found naturally in the rare Himalayan mayapple plant.
However, scientists at the Stanford University in California, say that they have managed to genetically engineer nicotiana benthamiana – the tobacco plant – to create a new extract that perform better than one of the key ingredients needed to create etoposide.
The researchers manipulated a tobacco plant to express new genes and identified the resulting compounds in the leaf tissue. They discovered six new genes, which when combined with the original four, produce a new ingredient for etoposide, desmethyl-epipodophyllotoxin.
They also claimed that etoposide outperforms podophyllotoxin as an ingredient for the chemotherapy drug. This study was published in the journal Science.
