Tobacco: it''s Not Just for Smoking

Source from:  Tobaccoasia 01/30/2015

Most news that we hear about tobacco in the mainstream media is not favorable when it comes to the future of this native of the Americas. It seems like every day we see a new piece of anti-tobacco legislation being pushed through in one country or another. The anti-tobacco lobbyists are stronger than ever, and in many parts of the world, tobacco companies are being legislated into a corner and possibly even out of existence. In this climate, you would be forgiven for thinking that tobacco is basically growing one root in the grave. But the tobacco plant still has a few aces up its sleeve! Recent research points to tobacco having numerous uses outside of smoking.

The name tobacco usually refers to most famous and widely used Nicotiana Tabacum and its shorter but more potent cousin Nicotiana Rustica. However, tobacco's genus, Nicotiana, covers over 70 species, and many of them have been found surprisingly promising in different areas.

Medicinal Uses

In the last issue, we told you about an experimental treatment for Ebola: the drug comes from tobacco plants that were turned into living pharmaceutical factories, a practice that is sometimes called "pharming". But some companies and researchers are now trying to create drugs and vaccines not just against Ebola, but also against such diseases as HIV, cancer, the Marburg virus and the norovirus, known for causing outbreaks of stomach problems on cruise ships.

According to Daniel Tuse, a consultant and managing director of Intrusept Biomedicine, plant-based drugs have attracted the attention and funding of the US government as a fast and inexpensive way to produce a lot of vaccines in case of a terrorist attack.

Scientists prefer tobacco plants because they grow quickly and their biology is well understood, which helps them to quickly produce the necessary proteins to be used in experimental medicines. The idea behind this process is to infiltrate the genetic blueprints for a particular protein into a plant and let the plant produce the proteins necessary. The protein can then be extracted from plant tissues.

In fact, nicotine, the most well-known "active ingredient" of tobacco, is one of the most studied drugs in the world. Indeed, the first neurotransmitter receptor identified at the beginning of last century was the nicotine receptor. Nicotine mimics the actions of acetylcholine and has been shown to modulate many neurotransmitters. This means that it could be used in the treatment of mental illness.

According to Ovid Pomerleau, Ph.D., Director of the Behavioral Medicine Program, University of Michigan and president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, "nicotine has long been a useful tool for researchers interested in probing the nervous system. Although the health risks associated with its intake via tobacco products has tended to tarnish society's view of nicotine, it is important to recognize that nicotine may have therapeutic potential with a number of disease states."

New and rather fascinating scientific data suggest that very low doses of nicotine can have a profound therapeutic effect on controlling the symptoms of Tourette's syndrome, the infamous neurologic disorder characterized by tics and uncontrollable vocal outbursts often filled with obscenities.

Robert Freedman, M.D. who works at the department of psychiatry at the University of Colorado also says there is research that indicates nicotine can normalize some of the psychophysiological deficits seen in patients with schizophrenia, which may explain the high instances of smoking among schizophrenic patients and could lead to novel therapeutic approaches.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that nicotine has a short term normalization effect on the electrical activity in the brain and people who suffer from such mental disorders as ADHD/ADD, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, and dementia may actually benefit from smoking.

In 2011, researchers at the University of Louisiana at Monroe (ULM) made headlines when they discovered anticancer compounds in seemingly the most unlikely of places - tobacco leaves.

Khalid El Sayed, an associate professor of medicinal chemistry at the ULM College of Pharmacy, and ULM colleagues Paul Sylvester and Girish Shah received a patent for their discovery of anti-cancer compounds in fresh tobacco leaves from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

According to Professor El Sayed, "The leaf and flower of the tobacco plant contain high amounts of the key flavor ingredient called cembranoids, which shows promise as an anti-cancer agent. It was very exciting to discover the anti-cancer activities." The so-called cembranoids are found in the waxy substance on fresh tobacco leaves and show potential for controlling metastatic breast and prostate cancers. The tobacco plant produces them as a chemical defense to protect itself against insects and harmful microbial infections.

As Karen Briski, head of the department of basic pharmaceutical sciences said at the time: "This is a remarkable discovery. It demonstrates that there is a helpful, healthy application for tobacco."

Aviation

Another rather unlikely but perfectly legitimate use of tobacco is as a source of biofuel. Mention biofuels and most people think of corn ethanol. But tobacco? Nevertheless, Boeing recently announced a collaboration with South African Airlines (SAA) to develop a renewable jet fuel made out of a new, energy-rich tobacco plant produced in South Africa. This new tobacco hybrid, known as Solaris, is virtually nicotine-free and has a high seed yield. It is currently produced by a company called SkyNRG, which promises to increase production to meet the company's needs. Currently, the biofuel will only be made from the seed, but new manufacturing processes are expected to allow the use of the entire plant as biofuel in the future.

Boeing and SAA are not alone in this - tobacco's potential as a viable biofuel source has attracted attention of researchers from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who are exploring ways to produce gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from tobacco leaf. Their goal is to design tobacco plants that use energy from sunlight in order to produce fuel molecules directly in their leaves. The leaves would then be crushed, and the fuel extracted and separated. The scientists estimate that about 1000 acres of tobacco could yield more than one million gallons of fuel.

The potential benefits of this development are hard to overestimate. They include the scientific progress in finding a new crop-source for biofuel, the economic boost of providing farmers a new market for a product that has seen declining demand for years, and the social value of encouraging tobacco growers to sell more of their crop for something other than smoking products, which might potentially reduce the incidence of emphysema and other respiratory illnesses.

Another great advantage is the fact that unlike corn and sorghum, which are also successfully used as fuel products, tobacco has no role in the food chain. Corn, for example, has a multitude of uses vital to the agriculture industry, as food, feedstock for animals, and a product for export. As a matter of fact, some food shortages are already attributed to food crops being used as biofuel. This would literally mean that tobacco would help feed the hungry. After all, tobacco is plentiful and boasts multiple harvests a year. Nearly 7 million tons are produced throughout the world every year, according to the US Census Bureau.

Gardening and Agriculture

Another potential use is as a natural pesticide, due to tobacco's nicotine content. For centuries, gardeners have used home-made mixtures of tobacco and water as a natural pesticide. In fact, tobacco is a great insect repellent for any garden.　By simply soaking as little as a cigarette amount of tobacco in a quart of water and allowing it to soak overnight, the nicotine released in the water will create an all-purpose insect repellent.

Scientists say that a "green" pesticide industry built around tobacco could mean additional income for farmers and a new environmentally-friendly pest-control agent. A promising way to convert tobacco leaves into pesticides involves heating tobacco leaves to about 900 degrees Fahrenheit in a vacuum to produce an unrefined substance called bio-oil. Scientists tested tobacco bio-oil against a wide variety of insect pests, including 11 different fungi, four bacteria, and the Colorado potato beetle. The oil killed all of the beetles and blocked the growth of two types of bacteria and one fungus. Aphids, flea beetles, slugs, snails, and thrips are a real nuisance if allowed to thrive on garden plants, but a mixture of powdered garlic, compost, and tobacco mixed into the soil around the base of your infested plants will rid your garden of these pests.

The Florida-based Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization (Echo) has developed a special tobacco spray. The spray is prepared by taking 250 grams of dried tobacco leaves, stems, or dust, and boiling them in four liters of water for 20 minutes. After the solution cools, it is then filtered through layered cotton cloth, four more liters of water and 50 grams of bar soap are also added. Such solution can be poured into sorghum and corn funnels to kill stalk borer, poured as a soil drench around plants to kill cutworms, or utilized to spray beans to prevent rust disease and also to control aphids, beetles, cabbage worms, caterpillars, grain weevils, leaf miners, mites, stem borers and thrips.

As you can see, tobacco has a future that is much brighter than it might seem at first glance. It is not the evil incarnated that it's been made out to be in the mainstream media. Let's hope we see some of these amazing scientific advances work for the benefit of everyone soon.