Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 10131–10136 (2008)

Ronald Levy of Stanford University Medical Center in California and his colleagues have carried out the first clinical trial of plant-produced therapeutic vaccines against non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The vaccines were grown in tobacco plants by infecting the plants with a tobacco mosaic virus containing DNA fragments cloned from each patient's cancer cells, thus matching each vaccine to its potential beneficiary.

Eleven of the 16 participants with the cancer had developed a cellular immune response 28 days after vaccination; six of these made antibodies specific to certain proteins found on the surface of their cancerous white blood cells.