ALTERNATIVE USES EXPLORED FOR TOBACCO.

Byline: Tina McCloud Newport News Daily Press

Talk about an image makeover: tobacco as a healer instead of an agent of death.

Researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University are using tobacco plants to produce a human enzyme that could be used - instead of the most expensive medicine in the world - to treat a rare genetic disorder.

Other pharmaceuticals, as well as products with more widespread uses - materials used to process cheese, for instance - also could be grown in tobacco, said Carole Cramer, a molecular biologist at Virginia Tech and vice president for research at CropTech Development Corp., a small biotechnology firm in Blacksburg, Va.

Cramer spoke to several hundred people this week at the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation's annual convention in Richmond. Many in the audience were tobacco farmers, who grow the state's No. 1 cash crop - valued at about $175 million in 1995. Some agriculture interests are eager to find alternative uses for at least some of the crop, which is under fire from many quarters.

Cramer's research involves treatment of a genetic disorder called Gaucher's (pronounced go-SHAY's) disease. People with the disease lack an enzyme needed to break down fatty substances in the body called lipids. As a result, the body stores the fats in bone marrow and the spleen and liver, often dramatically enlarging those organs.

The disease affects about 2,000 people in the United States, said Cramer. Many of its victims don't live past their late teens, she said.

The only medicine currently available to treat it, called Ceredase, costs an average of $160,000 a year, said Cramer. The enzyme is produced from human placentas. In the tobacco version, human DNA, the material that carries genetic information - in this case the enzyme code - is inserted into tobacco cells. The tobacco then produces the enzyme in its leaves.

The genetically engineered enzyme should be much cheaper than the human-derived type, said Cramer. She cited several reasons:

-The starting point for the engineered version is cheap and plentiful. Cramer said tobacco is the easiest plant to genetically engineer, although no one knows why.

-Plants cannot harbor diseases that are dangerous to humans, such as HIV or hepatitis, so plant-induced enzymes don't have to undergo as rigorous testing as enzymes from human sources.

-A seed smaller than a pin head will grow into a plant 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide - lots of production space. One plant could produce a dose of the enzyme. And a single plant would produce a million seeds, enough to plant an acre of crop. One big cost unknown is the production process - how the tobacco would be grown and how the enzyme would be commercially harvested from the crop, Cramer said.