Tobacco treatment for HIV

How a tobacco farm in Kent could provide a life-saving drug for millions · Genetic tweak allows HIV drug to be harvested · Environmentalists fear cross-contamination

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Tuesday July 4, 2006The Guardian
Full story

If the tobacco plants in Kent are a success, each one will provide 20 doses of an anti-HIV drug - enough to protect a woman from infection for up to three months.

Pharming is a marriage of high and low technology that capitalises on the advantages of both. Instead of needing a $500m drug manufacturing facility that takes five years to pass regulatory approval, pharming uses simple crop-growing practices that have been honed over centuries.

Professor Julian Ma, who leads the tobacco plant project at the Centre for Infection at St George's hospital in south London, acknowledges that the plants, and more importantly their pollen, have to be well contained.

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