LONDON, Ont. – It sounds like the agricultural research version of trying to make a silk purse from a pig’s ear.
Researchers for Agriculture Canada and the London Health Sciences Centre are on the verge of developing a tobacco plant that contains a protein that can be used in medicines.
The image of the tobacco plant, synonymous in the public mind with lung disease and cancer, could suddenly be given a more benign outlook.
“A lot of people see a lot of irony in it,” researcher Jim Brandle conceded with a smile. “But we don’t see it as the same crop as tobacco for smoking. It is like rapeseed and canola, two different crops.”
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Last summer, the first field trials began in fields operated by the Southern Crop Protection and Food Research Centre in London.
“I think it is maybe five years away from having a plant ready for commercial exploitation,” he said.
It is called molecular farming and potential advances range from using goat’s milk to produce a steel-like protein for commercial products to pigs that can produce semen containing human protein useful in some medicines.
But in southern Ontario where the tobacco industry produces more than $300 million in farm-
gate receipts and thousands of jobs, the potential to turn the familiar deep-green broad leaf into a health industry ally holds the most allure.
The tobacco industry has been under political siege for years and during the past decade it has undergone sharp contractions in production and the number of farmers.
Diversification has not been much of a success. The health industry is a glimmer.
“There would not be huge acreages but it would be lucrative and I think there would be great potential as an alternate crop for tobacco farmers,” said Brandle.
“This project represents the huge potential for co-operation between the agriculture and health care industries,” said Frank Marks, director of the London research centre.
Frank Menich, chair of the Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers’ Marketing Board, said it is premature to predict the impact on the industry.
“It is too early to know where it is going,” he said. “But any breakthrough in science that gives us a new market niche would bode well for the industry.”
Researchers are looking at the tobacco plant because it is a non-food crop, there are no wild relatives in the area and it does not survive over winter. The host would be a low nicotine version of the tobacco plant and not suitable for smoking.
Plants being tested have been genetically engineered to contain the human gene for a protein called Interleukin-10.
It can be used to treat such diseases as Crohn’s and inflammatory bowel syndrome.
