The rush to manufacture drugs in living organisms continues. Hot on the heals of the drug-goat, a team of European researchers have created transgenic tobacco plants that produce a potential treatment for diseases such as diabetes.

Mario Pezzotti, of the University of Verona, and colleagues successfully engineered the plant to produce anti-inflammatory compound interleukin-10, they report in BMC Biotechnology. Now they are going to feed these tobacco leaves to mice with autoimmune diseases to see if they are an effective treatment.

“Transgenic plants are attractive systems for the production of therapeutic proteins because they offer the possibility of large scale production at low cost, and they have low maintenance requirements,” says Pezzotti (press release). “The fact that they can be eaten, which delivers the drug where it is needed, thus avoiding lengthy purification procedures, is another plus compared with traditional drug synthesis.”

The press release, with considerable understatement, notes that tobacco “isn’t famous for its health benefits”. However, Pezzotti says it has many advantages for genetic modifiers such as himself.

“Tobacco is a fantastic plant because it is easy to transform genetically and you can easily regenerate an entire plant from a single cell,” he told Reuters.

Surely though it’s time to start considering the end user of any of these products.

The drug-laced milk from GM goats didn’t make it past the regulators in the US, but would consumers rather drink milk or eat tobacco leaves? The scientist who can make a GM chocolate that contains drugs is going to make a killing…

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